Paranoia of note:

"It's crystal clear to us that unless we get involved in the outcome of foreign law then we're going to be at grave risk," says Bull. Ann Beeson, associate legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, says "We now see regional and international human rights forums as simply another tool in the fight for social justice here in the United States."

Christian conservatives take the culture wars overseas to foreign courts
By Scott Michels
Posted 6/14/06

When a devout Christian man in England was fired in 2002 for refusing to work on Sundays, his case became something of a cause célèbre among British evangelicals. But the money and part of the legal strategy behind Stephen Copsey's latest court appeal comes not from London but from Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Alliance Defense Fund.

The legal advocacy group founded by Focus on the Family's James Dobson and the late Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, sees Copsey's case as part of an emerging threat to religious freedom in the United States. "If these cases are imported by United States courts as controlling precedent, we basically abandon America as we know it," says Benjamin Bull, chief counsel at ADF.

The fund, which has had recent victories challenging gay marriage in San Francisco and protecting student Christian groups, is part of a growing movement of Christian conservative lawyers who are taking the culture wars overseas. With the Supreme Court citing foreign and international law in recent controversial opinions, court cases across the globe have taken on new urgency for some activists on the right and the left, who see new opportunities to influence what happens in America's courtrooms.

"It's crystal clear to us that unless we get involved in the outcome of foreign law then we're going to be at grave risk," says Bull. Ann Beeson, associate legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, says "We now see regional and international human rights forums as simply another tool in the fight for social justice here in the United States."

Since the mid-1990s, Christian conservatives have grown more influential in the world of international human rights, long the province of the cultural left. American Christian organizations now lobby at the U.N. and provide funding, advice, and friend-of-the-court briefs in abortion, emergency-contraception, and religious-freedom cases from Colombia to Canada, from Australia to Nigeria. Groups such as the ADF, Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, and the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty Counsel have developed international networks of Christian lawyers, trained foreign lawyers, and sent their lawyers abroad.