Amy Coney Barrett’s 2017 confirmation hearing, analyzed

Barrett was a paid speaker five times, starting in 2011, at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program established to inspire a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law,” tax filings show. It was founded to show students “how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel in America.”

The Blackstone program is run by Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group whose founding leader has questioned the “so-called separation of church and state” as it is often understood. In the years Barrett spoke there, the fellowship’s suggested reading list included a book co-written by the same leader that lamented how Christians for too long had been “AWOL from the courthouse.”

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In several of the years she spoke, the Blackstone website bore the ADF logo and identified ADF as the program’s sponsor, according to archived versions. In 2015, the website was apparently redesigned; the ADF logo no longer appeared but the site clearly stated that the fellowship “is a program of Alliance Defending Freedom, an alliance-building legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.”

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A suggested reading list for the fellowship, published on Blackstone’s site from 2010 to 2015, included “The Homosexual Agenda” by senior ADF staffers Alan Sears and Craig Osten. The authors wrote that same-sex relationships led to “despair, disease and early death.”

“For many years, the church and Christians were essentially AWOL from the courthouse while dozens of legal cases were litigated, setting precedents the homosexual activists rely on today,” Sears and Osten wrote, according to a copy of the book uploaded to the Internet Archive. “We can no longer ignore the legal realm.”