Family Council Joins Amicus Brief Before U.S. Supreme Court

Free Speech,

In November, Family Council joined 52 other individuals and organizations in an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to protect basic First Amendment freedoms.

The case is NRA v. Vullo from New York.

Advancing American Freedom (AAF) led the amicus brief filed on November 19 asking the Supreme Court to hear the case.

In a statement, AAF said:

In this case, the New York government pressured insurance companies to drop coverage of insurance plans they offered through the National Rifle Association (NRA), offering prosecutorial lenience if they did so. Last year, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Maria Vullo, the Superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services, had violated the NRA’s First Amendment rights.

However, on remand, the Second Circuit held that Maria Vullo was entitled to qualified immunity and thus was immune from civil liability. The NRA is asking the Supreme Court to hear its case once again and vindicate the organization’s First Amendment Rights.

The amicus brief argues Superintendent Vullo should be held accountable for violating the NRA’s constitutional freedoms by weaponizing private companies against the NRA.

Unfortunately, in recent years, news outlets and congressional testimony have alleged that government policies and departments have been weaponized against law-abiding citizens — especially conservative organizations and Christians.

Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report showing that after the events of January 6, 2021, federal officials gave banks and financial institutions an analysis that listed legitimate, conservative groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom, the American College of Pediatricians, American Family Association, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel, National Organization for Marriage, and the Ruth Institute as “Hate Groups” alongside the KKK and the American Nazi Party.

Americans should be free to exercise their First Amendment freedoms without fear of being canceled by government officials.

You can read the amicus brief here.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

READ MORE

Free Only to Agree: The Limits of Freedom

Free Speech, , ,

Many western countries are putting the right of conscience and speech to the test. 

In March, Chris Elston, known as “Billboard Chris,” was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology. He was detained again in Belgium in June, this time along with Lois McLatchie Miller, a senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International. The two were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the realities of transgender treatment, wearing billboards that stated, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers” and “Children are never born in the wrong body.” Though they called the cops to ask for protection from harassment, they were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip searched, they were released without charge. 

Thought and speech has not always been treated this way. Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens enjoyed the liberty, to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies. That liberty is, based on what we’ve seen in Belgium and Britain and other nations, on shaky ground, from both state and institutional pressures. In some places, praying to yourself is considered unruly protest.  

Just recently, Lila Rose of LiveAction shared the story of Naomi Best, a therapy student at Santa Clara University, an ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California. As part of the coursework, the university insisted that therapy students view extreme pornography and share their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption regularly given to Muslim students, they refused. When she described what happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she pointed out, 

If we don’t have a set of therapists with diverse worldviews, and with tolerance for people with diverse worldviews, we will alienate people who need psychological care, and we will cause more harm than good. 

Totalitarian states such as East Germany and Soviet Russia guaranteed citizens the freedom of worship but would levy fierce and often violent penalties for spreading religion outside church walls. In those countries, freedom of conscience was only the freedom to believe in one’s heart and head and maybe, one’s house of worship. Worldview diversity was never something allowed to enter the public square. 

The First Amendment guaranteed more. In just 45 words, it protects conscience rights that are public. Thus, nonsensical campus chants that “speech is violence” or “silence is violence” are, in law, separated from actual violence. The founders wanted a country in which citizens could think and worship as they believed but could also assemble together and take those beliefs out into the world. Both Belgium and Britain, which is currently debating whether saying things that offend Islam should be illegal, could use something like that, written down into law, about now.  

Of course, all freedoms have limits. In the United States, that limit is not one’s own head or heart but real harm done to another. Certainly, that must be constantly clarified and adjudicated, but it’s a far better arrangement than a limit based on how someone else might feel.  

The First Amendment is a bulwark against speech police and one of the Founding Fathers’ greatest legacies. It’s a structured freedom that is part of the inheritance of the Christian view of humanity, recognized as both sacred and sinful. It’s a legacy that will not last if people are not willing to express their deeply held beliefs and defend the right to do so.

Copyright 2025 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

READ MORE