This Washington Post article on the Alliance Defense Fund caught my eye.

Considering itself the antithesis of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Scottsdale-based organization has used money and moxie to become the leading player in a movement to tug the nation to the right by challenging decades of legal precedent. By stepping into the nation’s most impassioned debates about religion in the public sphere, the group aims to bring law and society into alignment with conservative Christianity.

The group successfully challenged the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses in California and Oregon, and worked on statewide ballot initiatives prohibiting such unions. Its attorneys helped the Boy Scouts win approval of a policy barring gay Scout leaders.

The group has been battling embryonic stem cell research in Missouri and won a Supreme Court stay preventing the removal of California’s 29-foot Mount Soledad cross. In Florida, where saving the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo became a crusade, the group supported efforts to nourish her.

The article caught my eye because you know what else the Alliance Defense Fund is working on? Passing a refusal clause for pharmacists in Washington state.

Indeed, I interviewed an attorney from this radical Christian group for my story on refusal clauses last month.

This quote from the Post article may sound alarmist…

“They’re not for some form of generic religious freedom. They’re for Christian superiority, that Christians take over the courts,” said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “They are living in this fantasy world where the majority religion, Christianity, is claimed to be literally under attack.”

…but it’s not an alarmist quote. At all. It’s an accurate description of the group.

Indeed, check out this exerpt from my interview with Byron Babione, an attorney with the ADF:

“It’s a really un-American idea to condition a profession on a willingness to leave your moral and religious conviction in the car,” Byron Babione, legal counsel for the Arizona-based ADF, tells me. ADF sent a letter to the WSBP in March supporting the board’s push for a conscience clause. (The ADF is most famous for winning 2000’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which overturned a New Jersey law that had mandated the Boy Scouts to admit gays.)

“Our argument is not that people shouldn’t be able to get their prescriptions,” Babione says. “It’s that pharmacists with a sincere objection based on moral conviction should not be forced to dispense medication that strikes at the core of their beliefs.”

Babione believes conscience clauses protect minority views. “Americans talk a good game on accommodation and toleration, so why not accommodate pharmacists on this very narrow area, especially when there’s an abundance of pharmacists that will fill the prescription?” he asks. “In this case there’s no imminent harm [to the patient] because there are so many alternative pharmacies willing to fill Plan B prescriptions.” (Try telling that to a woman who lives in Walla Walla.)

Would Babione’s argument change, I ask him, if there came a time when a majority of pharmacists didn’t want to fill prescriptions for Plan B. Babione said the question was irrelevant because if Christian conservatives were ever in the majority, Plan B would be illegal anyway.

I guess the ADF’s commitment to minority rights isn’t set in stone. They want to grant Christians the privilege of being excused from the law when Christians don’t believe in the law, but they want to set the rules for others when Christians are in control.

My chat with the Alliance Defense Fund creeped me out so much that before my pharmacy article came out, I did a separate Slog just about the interview. I’m glad to see the Post is creeped out too.