Liberty Counsel is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt religious liberty organization that engages in litigation related to evangelical Christian values. Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by its chairman Mathew Staver and its president Anita L. Staver, who are attorneys and married to each other. The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed Liberty Counsel as an anti-LGBT hate group, a designation the group has disputed. The group is a Christian ministry.
History
Liberty Counsel started as a religious liberty organization that focused its litigation efforts on freedom of speech cases. The organization used freedom of speech arguments instead of religious free exercise claims in its cases. In addition to litigation, Liberty Counsel saw education of its members and public officials regarding religious rights as a goal.
Positions and responses
In 1990, Liberty Counsel supported a change in public library rules which had excluded religious and political events from library meeting rooms until the ACLU met with a library official.
In 1998, Liberty Counsel was part of a coalition of organizations that backed a state-level "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" in Florida; others supporting the bill were the ACLU, Florida Family Counsel, Aleph Institute and Justice Fellowship.
In 2009, a Liberty Counsel attorney from its Tennessee office worked with city commissioners to draft an ordinance limiting the permitted locations for adult bookstores and similar establishments.
In 2011, the organization expressed that defining "personhood" as beginning at conception was a path to barring abortion.
Liberty Counsel opposed the repeal of the U.S. military's former policy "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that banned personnel from openly identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The group opposes the addition of sexual orientation, gender identity, or similar provisions to hate crimes legislation, including the anti-lynching bill passed unanimously by the Senate in 2018. The group issued a statement, saying that an "anti-lynching bill should apply to everyone". It also opposes same-sex marriage and same-sex civil unions.
Liberty Counsel has been listed as an anti-gay group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In 2015, SPLC listed the group as a hate group, in part because Liberty Counsel opposes LGBT participation in scouting and because Liberty Counsel's leadership implicitly compared gay men to pedophiles. Liberty Counsel has challenged that SPLC's designation and the Associated Press's reporting thereof. Fox News referred to that designation as a "smear".
In 2017, Liberty Counsel sued GuideStar USA, Inc., an information service specializing in U.S. nonprofit ratings, for flagging Liberty Counsel as having been labeled a hate group by the SPLC. In 2018, a Virginia federal judge dismissed Liberty Counsel's suit, ruling that GuideStar's "expressive right to comment on social issues" was protected by the First Amendment. The SPLC was not named in the lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected Liberty Counsel's appeal. GuideStar removed the SPLC annotations from the entries for Liberty Counsel and 45 other organizations shortly after adding them, citing "harassment and threats directed at our staff and leadership" and "our commitment to objectivity and our concerns for our staff's wellbeing."
In 2020, Liberty Counsel launched "ReOpen Church Sunday" to encourage Christian leaders in the United States to hold in-person services on the first weekend of May. On-site religious services had stopped in some locations due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Activities
Orlando Magic general manager Pat Williams was the scheduled keynote speaker for the organization's kick off banquet in 1990.
In 2000, Liberty Counsel threatened legal action against a public library in Jacksonville, Florida after the library held a party that featured readings from Harry Potter books and distributed "Hogwarts' Certificate of Accomplishment" to the children who attended. Staver said, "Witchcraft is a religion, and the certificate of witchcraft endorsed a particular religion in violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause."
Liberty Counsel sponsors an annual "Day of Purity" campaign where youth wear white T-shirts to show their commitment to sexual abstinence until marriage.