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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be an ardent defender of religious liberty, all experience shows.
As general counsel of a law firm devoted to religious liberty cases, I normally would evaluate a judicial nominee by searching through his or her decisions on the First Amendment and the free exercise clause. However, I didn’t need to comb the archives to see where Kavanaugh stands on religious liberty, because of personal experience — both my own, and that of my friend and CEO, Kelly Shackelford — dealing with Kavanaugh as a lawyer and a judge.
[ Also read: Kavanaugh comes knocking but Democrats won’t meet with him ]
You can tell a lot about a person by where they invest their time — especially when they are not being paid for it.
Before he was a judge, Kavanaugh volunteered his time to work with Shackelford and another prominent First Amendment Supreme Court practitioner, Jay Sekulow, on the case of Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe. Together, they argued that student-led, student-initiated prayer before high school football games does not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Kavanaugh would again volunteer his time to write a friend-of-the-court brief at the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the use of public school facilities by a religious club after hours in a pivotal equal access case, Good News Club v. Milford School District .
More recently, First Liberty Institute and one of our network attorneys, Shannen Coffin of Steptoe & Johnson, filed an amicus brief in the case of Archdiocese of Washington v. WMATA .
The case arose when the archdiocese attempted to purchase advertising space from the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority to place advertisements on WMATA buses around the Christmas holiday. WMATA rejected the archdiocese’s proposal, citing its policy that “Advertisements that promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief are prohibited.”
Though the case is still pending, Kavanaugh’s questioning of the WMATA’s policy at oral argument, in which he described WMATA’s policy as “pure discrimination” and “odious to the First Amendment,” leaves little doubt as to his stance on the importance of protecting religious […]