If you were to read a lengthy article in The Washington Post that was recently published, you might get the idea that the ADF is the evil twin of the ACLU. In reality, the ACLU is always working out of hate and fear. They hate and fear Christians, religion, and national existence and they fight it at every
turn. The ADF is the love and faith side of the universe.

Any one familiar with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) knows that it is one powerhouse organization fighting for real religious freedom. And, the battle is being waged right here in this country. Essentially, the ADF is the Christian response to the ACLU. The president and CEO of the ADF, Alan Sears, joined with the ADF's Craig Osten to write a "docudrama," entitled The ACLU vs America , describing in detail the ACLU's efforts to destroy America and America's Christian moral and spiritual footing. In a nutshell, the ADF funds litigation and litigates on behalf of religion. Now, if you were to read a lengthy article in The Washington Post, which was recently published (and available on line here ), you might get the idea that the ADF is the evil twin of the ACLU. That "perspective" of course is just the result of the Post's agenda to marginalize Christians, Christianity and organizations that support the Bible in American life.

I wanted to do two things in this essay beyond merely cheerleading. First, people should know that the ADF is truly fighting for religious freedom. I can testify to that based upon personal knowledge.* I happen to sit on the executive board of the Silverstein Hebrew Academy, a very high quality orthodox Jewish religious pre-school, kindergarten, and elementary school operating in the Village of Great Neck Estates in Long Island, New York. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with this neck of the woods (sorry, I couldn't resist), Jews are probably in the majority. Before the great influx of Sephardic Persian Jews into the area during the past decade, Great Neck, or the North Shore as it is called, was the home of very wealthy, very liberal, and therefore, very irreligious Jews. Any sign of religion would send them scurrying about looking for their checkbooks to make another contribution to the ACLU, their most beloved organization if you don't count the Anti-Defamation League, which is ideologically aligned with the ACLU in more ways than one.

Now, I neglected one other important demographic fact. The Silverstein Hebrew Academy is affiliated with Chabad-Lubavitch, which means it isn't just orthodox, it is "ultra-orthodox." Now, I have never figured out what that journalistic term really means except to say Lubavitch Chassidim take their religion seriously. But the Academy was a school not for Chassidic children but neighborhood children, many of whom were not from orthodox or "religious" homes and who would otherwise be sent to public schools and indoctrinated in the ways of secularism, assimilation, intermarriage and loss of faith. Precisely because the Academy's mission was to provide a warm, nurturing environment where Jewish children could learn the 3Rs along with a love for G-d and for their own faith and heritage, it was marked by the Village Fathers (we'll leave the Mothers out of this for now) for destruction.

Essentially, once the Village learned that Chabad was interested in buying a commercial property to build a school, the mayor and his buddies turned to their high-powered Jewish Village lawyer, who, after examining the the code, informed them how to change the zoning ordinance because as it stood Chabad could build a school on the selected property as of right. No sooner than you could say "Call the ACLU," the Village had changed the code so that effectively there was no property anywhere in the Village where you could house a religious institution. Unless, of course, you came on your knees and begged for a conditional use permit. The Academy chose to do that rather than spend millions on legal fees and waste years and allow more Jewish children to be lost to the ACLU.

After a full two years of delays and enormous costs for "Environmental Impact Studies," the Academy realized something had to give. Maybe litigation was the only way. The Village politicos got wind of the fact that they had pushed the new school into a corner which might backfire with a nasty lawsuit that would expose their illegal multi-year campaign to destroy this little Jewish day school, so they sent word through the channels to the Academy: agree to some Draconian restrictions and we just might say yes on a limited basis and for a limited period of time. I won't bore you with the dozens of patently obnoxious and illegal restrictions, but I will take the liberty to highlight a few illustrative ones. For a building that could legally and safely house well over 300 occupants, the school could have no more than 72 students. Why? Each student needed x number of parking spaces. Imagine that. Great Neck residents are so affluent that pre-schoolers come to school with their own limousine that must wait in the parking lot with their drivers until school is dismissed. The other example: Absolutely no evening PTA meetings, no weekend programs, and no summer activities. Keep in mind the school is not in a "quiet" neighborhood but in a very busy and noisy commercial district. I wish I could come up with a cute joke to rationalize these limitations, but my sense of humor escapes me.

After five years of harassment, criminal summonses and the like, the conditional use permit expired. The Academy was faced with an ugly choice: shut down or litigate against a wealthy village run by anti-religious Elites. The Academy chose the latter. The problem: legal representation for such litigation by any decent law firm could cost close to a million dollars. Should the school mortgage its property, gifted generously by its founders Stanley and Raina Silverstein, and risk it all? The Village was not going to budge. The Academy would be squeezed out of existence literally. Every day, like clock work, the Village of Great Neck Estates' "code enforcement officer" came by and delivered thousands of dollars worth of criminal summonses. And for what? Health and safety violations? Absolutely not. This building was in superb condition and the grounds were immaculate and child-proofed. For educational reasons? Hardly. The secular and Jewish education was as good as any in Long Island. Nope. Just a bunch of bullies under the color of village "law" who hated the idea of churches or synagogues or worse, religious schools, anywhere within their little fiefdom cleansed of religious fundamentalism.

But, the Good L-rd looked down on the situation and decided it was time to even the odds. To oppose the Village's big shot lawyer, He delivered the ADF, riding in on white horses and wearing the shining white armor of faith in G-d. These folks were real neshamos (i.e., souls) as we say. Their lawyer flew in from Washington, D.C., and after spending several days immersed in the facts, he developed a simple strategy for the federal litigation: the Village had already done the heavy lifting with the passage of the new code in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Seven years worth of facts, while interesting if you like this sort of thing, were not as important as something so simple as a village exploiting the power of the state and the law to banish religion from its boundaries.

I wish I could give you a happy ending but the battle has just begun. The Academy is in federal court but I can tell you, and I speak now as a former big firm corporate lawyer who worked among the best and brightest legal minds in the country, the ADF lawyers are just that. The best and brightest and committed. These men and women could be working in any big firm environment and making the big, really big bucks, but instead, they are working out of love and faith. And, it is all pro bono. It just doesn't get more inspirational than that.

And what's more, it isn't like the ACLU; in fact it is its opposite. The ACLU is always working out of hate and fear. They hate and fear Christians, religion, and national existence and they fight it at every turn. The ADF is the love and faith side of the universe. It is really that simple.

But now that you know that the ADF isn't just fighting for a Christian America, that the organization is truly fighting for religious liberty, let me add a word on that, which might be my real point here. As a Jew, and as one of those ultra-orthodox Chassidim, let me say that I want the ADF to fight for a Christian America. Don't get me wrong. They should continue to fight for good Jewish religious causes as time and energy permits, but the Jews we are fighting in Great Neck are the liberals fighting religion and America's national existence everywhere. Religious liberty in America must mean first and foremost, a Christian America.

For those who would see in this call a danger threatening religious freedom, I can only recommend a re-reading of the plain language of the U.S. Constitution, notably the First Amendment. The historical fact of this country's founding by Christian Europeans interested in the establishment of a nation connected to and dependent upon its profound faith in G-d and set in a land and People dedicated to liberty is too plain to debate. But for their Christian faith, there would never have been an America. But for their Christian faith, America would not stand today. Freedom from the establishment of a national church was most certainly guaranteed, but religion, the Christian religion, was infused in state and local laws and outlook, and it was this faith that bound the People in ways no science, no sociological study, no written history, could ever begin to capture.

Without a strong Christian base, this country will have little in the way of faith to counteract the liberal creed pursued so fervently by the ACLU-types seeking to stamp out religious "primitivism" in the name of progress. This country needs strong and committed Christians to fight for our national existence and to do so at every corner and in every forum. I understand why the ADF won't announce their goal to be to restore Christianity, and why it is framed in the lexicon of generic religious freedom — so let me say it. The ADF should be fighting for Christians and a Christian America. By doing so, they will preserve my ability to raise my children as committed Jews in a land and among a people that embrace the Truth of Existence. This is national existence and Peoplehood. We don't debate whether American should or should not be Christian. It is. For us, it is simply beyond debate. If that were not the case, G-d forbid, this country would be nothing. As a Jew, I don't fear Christians. I fear those who hate or demean Christians. Who will fight for national existence and Peoplehood when the Progressives call for "internationalism" and the World State all in the name of human rights? Who will fight and die to defeat Islam, or even to recognize that this "religion " from the East is an unqualified evil? If you listen carefully to the ACLU, Americans have more to fear from fundamentalist Christians than from al-Qaeda.

No, I pray for the ADF and its continued success and I pray for America and the truth of its existence. The Alliance Defense Fund is part of that truth. And, for that, we are grateful.

*Note: all of what is written as fact is sourced in the pleadings in the federal lawsuit discussed and should be understood in that context.