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Press Releases

AAF Fights for Parents and Reality

Advancing American Freedom led a coalition of 55 other amici in fighting for the fundamental right of all parents to protect their children from being exposed to sexually explicit material in schools. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the School Board introduced more than 20 pro-LGBT books to the English curriculum for elementary school students. While state law gives parents a right to be notified and opt their children out of sex education materials they find objectionable, there is no equivalent law protecting parents against indoctrination in the English curriculum. Along with the books, teachers were instructed to answer student questions with canned responses including that telling elementary school students that “When we’re born, people make a guess about our gender,” that “Our body parts do not decide our gender,” and that “When someone tells us what our gender is, we believe them.”  A religiously diverse group of parents thus sued to protect their children from being exposed to such pernicious lies.

AAF filed an amicus brief supporting these parents for the second time, now at the Supreme Court, asking the Court to take up the case and protect the fundamental right of parents around the country to direct the upbringing of their children.

“Parents send their children to school expecting them to learn. They do not send them to school to be indoctrinated into novel ideologies,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “For decades, in the death grip of the teachers unions, public schools have repeatedly failed to teach our children reading and math at grade level. Now, schools are junking up curricula with ideologies that reject basic reality. The brave parents in this case are rightly standing up and fighting back.”

Read the full brief here.

AAF Takes Stand Against Absurd Pronoun Mandate

Advancing American Freedom continues its fight to tether Washington bureaucrats to reality, filing comments challenging a new proposed rule from Department of Health and Human Services that is an omnibus of absurdity.  The rule helpfully provides a list of the pronouns that might need to be recorded including ze/zir/zir/zirs/zirself, co/co/cos/cos/coself and, reflecting the ups and downs of life, yo/yo/yos/yos/yoself.

“The federal bureaucrats at HHS should stop playing ideological yo-yo and focus on improving healthcare worthy of a free people that provides for greater evidence-based treatment, access, and safety,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “If the regulators who drafted this proposed rule want to live in a fantasy world, they can leave HHS and find like-minded individuals in some online world. But so long as they make rules that will affect healthcare for all Americans, they must focus on real people in the real world.”

Read the full comment here.

AAF Continues its Fight for Reality Against the Federal Government’s Repeated Efforts to Subvert It

Advancing American Freedom continues its fight against the Biden-Harris Administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX, leading a coalition of 41 other amici in an amicus brief in Rapides Parish v. Department of Education. Following the disappointing reasoning of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, the Department of Education issued a regulation reinterpreting Title IX’s protections against sex discrimination to fancifully include discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Several cases around the country, including Rapides Parish, are challenging this abandonment of reality. While the rule claims not to apply to sports, its logic basically destroys distinctions between men and women wherever Title IX applies. And the numbers don’t lie. Women and girls need sports and private spaces from which men are excluded. Finally, lurking in the background of the gender debate is the horrifying issue of puberty blockers for children.

“One of the fundamental questions for policy makers and judges is whether we will have laws that comport with reality or not,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “When law and policy try to govern the world as bureaucrats or politicians wish it were, rather than as it actually is, people are inevitably hurt in the process. AAF intends to stand for the truth for its own sake and for all those who will suffer if America fails to live in reality.”

Read the full brief here.

Advancing American Freedom Fights for the Health and Safety of Women and the Unborn

Advancing American Freedom continued its fight for the health and safety of women and the unborn, filing testimony in a Senate Finance Committee hearing about abortion. This testimony describes the numerous ways the FDA ignored science and the law when it approved chemical abortion drugs more than two decades ago. It also describes the FDA’s repeated loosening of protections around the prescription of chemical abortion drugs, made all the more reckless by its removal of adverse event reporting for harms caused by abortion drugs short of death of the mother. It’s time for Congress to assert its authority and demand that the FDA stop prioritizing a radical abortion agenda over science and over the safety and health of women.

Read full testimony here.

AAF Leads Coalition Fighting for State Authority to Protect Women and the Unborn

Advancing American Freedom led a coalition of 63 other organizations and individuals fighting for the ability of States to protect life in the face of the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort to force doctors to perform abortions. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), passed by a bipartisan Congress and signed by President Reagan, was intended to ensure that a person’s inability to pay did not prevent him from receiving essential emergency medical treatment. It also explicitly requires doctors to consider the wellbeing of an unborn child when the emergency is labor. The Biden-Harris Administration decided that that decades-old law requires emergency room doctors to perform abortions.

“EMTALA was not and is not a Trojan Horse for legally required abortion,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “President Reagan did not sign a pro-abortion law and EMTALA has never been interpreted to require abortion until the Biden-Harris Administration. The Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health returned the authority to regulate abortion to the States. The Biden-Harris Administration’s interpretation of EMTALA is nothing more than a bald-faced effort to undermine the Court’s decision by fiat.”

Read the brief here.

AAF Advocates for Cutting Back the Power of Unelected Bureaucrats

Advancing American Freedom led a coalition of 42 other organizations and individuals calling on the Supreme Court to pare back the power of unelected bureaucrats and restore the President’s constitutional authority over the Executive Branch. AAF and its fellow amici filed an amicus brief in Leacho, Inc. v. Consumer Product Safety Commission urging the Supreme Court to take up the case and rule in favor of Leachco.

“The Framers of our Constitution believed that a combination of structural constraints on government power and popular accountability was essential to the protection of liberty. The administrative state, by design, circumvents both of these protections,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “With the downfall of Chevron, the Supreme Court reclaimed much of its constitutional authority from the administrative state. Now it is time for the Court to do the same for the Executive Branch by taking up this case and ruling for Leachco.”

Read the full brief here.

AAF Fights to Keep Women’s Sports and Private Spaces Women-Only

Advancing American Freedom continues its effort to fight the rampant gender ideology of the Biden-Harris Administration policy that reinterprets “sex discrimination” in Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and so-called “gender identity.”

AAF led a coalition of 36 other amici in an amicus brief in Tennessee v. Cardona, arguing that this reinterpretation of Title IX would harm women’s sports, and arguing that there is no excuse, in any stage of life, for men to be competing in women’s sports.

“Women’s athletic spaces must be protected for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that such protection is essential to encourage the years of hard work and dedication necessary for athletic excellence,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “The Biden-Harris Administration needs to be told that female athletes deserve to be able to compete against other women, not men, and women in general deserve private spaces. The Biden-Harris Administration’s rule would use Title IX to strip women and girls of the very benefits it was designed to ensure.”

Read the brief here.

AAF Fights SEC’s Mass-Surveillance of Americans

Advancing American Freedom and 48 other amici supported a challenge to the constitutionality of a mass surveillance operation against the American people. In their amicus brief in Davidson v. Gensler, AAF and its fellow amici argued that the beleaguered Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is circumventing Congress by compelling private entities it regulates to build and pay for a program to snoop on every household that owns stock or an IRA.

“The CAT (consolidated audit trail) database is unconstitutional, contrary to statutory law, and would inevitably be hacked by our foreign enemies and by malign actors at home to harm America and Americans. The bottom line is, this information is none of the government’s business,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “The government has a history of leaking sensitive information and of having its databases hacked. The CAT would create both the opportunity and the inevitability for that problem on a massive scale.”

It is believed to be the largest surveillance program initiated since 9/11, and the second largest surveillance program operated by the American government, smaller only than that of the National Security Agency. Without authorization or appropriation from Congress, the SEC has been building this system since 2012. It has usurped the congressional power of the purse by compelling entities it regulates, entities that are in no position to protest, to pay for CAT’s construction and operation.

“Federal regulatory agencies are circling this case like jackals, watching to see if the Courts will allow them to tear away at powers the Constitution reserves only to Congress, or the People,” said Wheat. “This may be the most alarming Constitutional case of the entire Biden-Harris Administration.”

Read the article from NationalReview.com here.

Read the article from TheDailyCaller.com here.

Read the brief here.

Advancing American Freedom Files Amicus Brief to Defend Jewish Professors

Advancing American Freedom led an amicus brief with 36 other amici in Goldstein v. PSC/CUNY arguing that the right to free association includes the right to fully disassociate from a labor union and thus not to be represented by it. In this case, Jewish professors in the CUNY system are challenging the requirement that they be represented by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the mandated labor union for professors at CUNY. The PSC has engaged in anti-Israel and antisemitic speech supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and accusing Israel of apartheid. Naturally, several Jewish professors object to being represented in their employment negotiations by such a group.

“The ability to associate freely touches every part of political, social, and personal life. Who one marries, goes to church with, and allows to influence one’s children are all associational decisions protected by the First Amendment,” said AAF General Counsel J. Marc Wheat. “The fight of these Jewish professors not to be represented by a group that clearly hates Israel is a fight for the same right we all have to ensure that those around us or who speak on our behalf have our best interest at heart.”

Read the full brief here.

AAF fights to defend North Carolina’s Pro-Life Law

Advancing American Freedom led an amicus brief with 57 other amici in Bryant v. Moore, arguing that states have both the responsibility and the authority to protect the unborn where the federal government fails to do so. North Carolina attempted to do exactly that, but the district court in this case found that federal law, which regulates chemical abortion drugs, preempts state efforts to impose stricter protections for the health of women and the unborn. As we said in our brief to the Fourth Circuit, “Appellants North Carolina House Speaker Timothy K. Moore and North Carolina Senate President pro tempore Philip E. Berger are using their official powers to defend North Carolina’s state law. Unhappily for our system of adversarial representation in court, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein has willfully abdicated that responsibility in a shocking failure to carry out his duties . . . When state officials like the Attorney General will not do their job, it is left to others like Advancing American Freedom and amici help fill in the gap.”

“Where the federal government fails to protect the fundamental rights of those within its jurisdiction, states have both the authority and responsibility to do so,” said AAF General Counsel Marc Wheat. “If Congress intends to preempt state law on an issue as controversial and significant as abortion, it must do so clearly so that the courts can assess the legitimacy of that delegation of power. AAF supports North Carolina’s effort to protect the right to life of the most vulnerable people in the state; the unborn.”

Read the full brief here.