Alliance Defending Freedom

Overview

2026 was the best year Alliance Defending Freedom ever had at the Supreme Court — and it was also the year its lawyers were fighting in Pakistan’s highest constitutional court to free a 12-year-old girl forced to marry her abductor (MBC Pathway; ADF International). That is the pairing the standard profile of ADF never shows you: the domestic machine that now claims 20 direct Supreme Court victories since 2011, and the international arm litigating child forced-marriage cases the domestic culture wars never touch. This profile starts there, not with the founding-story listicle everyone repeats.

ADF is a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona (The Christian Post). It was founded by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and more than two dozen conservative Christian leaders explicitly to counter the ACLU — Dobson’s founding line was “There must be a response to the ACLU” (Baptist News Global). Chalkbeat describes it as an Arizona-based conservative law firm and legal advocacy group whose mission is grounded in the historic Christian tradition (Chalkbeat). Its CEO, president and chief counsel is Kristen Waggoner (MBC Pathway).

The 2026 Supreme Court streak

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, two consolidated cases challenging state laws that restrict girls’ and women’s sports to biological females (MBC Pathway). On the Title IX question the Court voted 9-0 that the 1972 law permits states to maintain sex-specific sports teams; on the broader Equal Protection question it divided 6-3 in the states’ favor. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas concurred separately, and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson partially dissented on the Equal Protection question. Kavanaugh posed the central question directly: “Under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, may schools maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females? … The answer is yes.”

ADF was inside both cases, not just watching them. It served as co-counsel to West Virginia Attorney General J. B. McCuskey and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, and separately represented intervening athletes on both sides — Lainey Armistead and Adaleia Cross for West Virginia, Madison Kenyon and Mary Kate Marshall of Idaho State University (MBC Pathway). West Virginia had enacted its Save Women’s Sports Act in 2021 and Idaho its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in March 2020, the first law of its kind in the nation; both had been blocked below by the Fourth and Ninth Circuits. The Court granted certiorari in July 2025, consolidated the cases, and heard oral argument on January 13, 2026. The twin rulings brought ADF’s record of direct Supreme Court victories to 20 since 2011, per the outlet — a figure no other conservative public-interest legal organization matches, in its telling. Waggoner’s reaction was blunt: “Men cannot be women, and no drug erases the male athletic advantage,” and the 23 states without such laws have “run out of excuses.”

Three months earlier, on March 31, 2026, the Court had ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar, striking down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy as applied to licensed counselor Kaley Chiles, whom ADF represented (DNA Magazine). Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority held that talk therapy counts as protected speech — “the spoken word is perhaps the quintessential form of protected speech, which does not lose its protection simply because it can be described as therapy” — and that any law restricting it must survive strict scrutiny. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter, reading a 35-page dissent from the bench and warning the ruling could “usher in an era of unprofessional and unsafe medical care.” The case went back to the lower courts, where Colorado must now prove its ban survives the highest legal bar.

2025: the setup year

The 2026 streak was built on a 2025 that Baptist News Global called a banner year (Baptist News Global). ADF made four Supreme Court appearances that year. It won one — Medina v. Planned Parenthood, defending South Carolina’s decision to direct Medicaid funding away from Planned Parenthood in a June 26 ruling — and lost one: the case of Oklahoma’s St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, a Christian school that would have received taxpayer funding, where the Court upheld an earlier Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling against the school. ADF’s response to the loss was characteristically strategic: it helped a Colorado group start a Christian school there to fight again for taxpayer funding of Christian schools.

By 2025 the outlet counted 16 Supreme Court rulings won by ADF, with the organization playing a role in another 83 decisions. A 2023 profile in The New Yorker summarized what those wins bought: “Overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.” The Trump administration met ADF halfway: 14 of the president’s 2025 executive orders aligned with and supported ADF’s advocacy, including seven in the first month — on women’s sports, K-12 schooling, gender medicine for minors, the Mexico City Policy, the Hyde Amendment, merit-based hiring and federal censorship — plus four more ADF cheered, on children and families, fair banking, parental control of education, and eradicating anti-Christian bias.

And ADF’s reach extended into the judiciary itself. The New Republic reported a campaign to install senior ADF attorney Erin Hawley — the wife of Senator Josh Hawley, who argued Dobbs, 303 Creative and Moyle v. United States — on a vacancy on the Eighth Circuit, part of what the outlet described as ADF’s strategic campaign to install movement-aligned lawyers in federal courts (Baptist News Global).

The Colorado two-front war

Colorado has become ADF’s most productive battlefield — and in September 2026 the organization opened a new front there. On September 9, ADF filed Christian Medical & Dental Associations v. Sullivan in federal district court in Colorado, on behalf of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations and Button Family Practice P.C., the Cañon City clinic where Dr. Marcus Button has practiced family medicine for more than two decades (KLZ). The suit challenges Colorado’s application of its anti-discrimination law to require healthcare professionals to provide gender-transition drugs and procedures — even when the doctor considers them medically, ethically or religiously wrong — and to bar doctors from publicly explaining why they refuse. The named defendant is Aubrey Sullivan, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division.

The legal strategy is a direct sequel to Chiles. The background runs through Boe v. Children’s Hospital Colorado, in which the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on May 18, 2026, that patients had shown a reasonable probability of succeeding on a discrimination claim and ordered the hospital to restore gender-transition treatment for minors — while writing that a hospital can define the scope of services it offers but cannot force individual providers to prescribe against their judgment. If the new case reaches the appellate level, it goes to the 10th Circuit — the same circuit that produced both 303 Creative and Chiles before the Supreme Court reversed.

The pattern in Colorado is older than the new suit. In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, ADF represented web designer Lorie Smith in the 6-3 ruling that she could not be compelled to create expressive wedding websites for same-sex weddings (KLZ). Before that, Masterpiece Cakeshop saw the Court rule that Colorado had failed to treat baker Jack Phillips’s religious beliefs with constitutional neutrality.

The second 2026 Colorado front is a school-library fight. In July 2026, lawyers from ADF and the Heritage Foundation joined the defense of the Elizabeth School District in Elbert County against a suit brought by the ACLU of Colorado — representing two students, an NAACP chapter and an authors group — over 18 books the district removed from school libraries in fall 2024, titles including The Bluest Eye, Beloved and The Kite Runner (Chalkbeat). The district’s own 2025 filing argued that “a school library’s curation decisions are government speech immune from First Amendment scrutiny.” A federal jury trial was set for December 2026, and the district is fundraising to pay for it. Heritage’s brand-new Legal Action Center got its first client in the case; the district introduced ADF as holding a 20-win Supreme Court record. There is a symmetry worth noticing: the organization Dobson founded as “a response to the ACLU” is now litigating against the ACLU of Colorado in federal court.

The Pakistan front

ADF International — the organization’s overseas arm — does work that looks nothing like its American docket. In Pakistan, it represents girls abducted and forced into marriage and religious conversion (ADF International). Maria Shahbaz was 12 when she was abducted from her Christian family in July 2025 by 30-year-old Shehryar Ahmad, forced to renounce her faith, and married to her captor against her will. Her case reached Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court in December 2025; in February 2026 the court granted custody to her abductor — without ever confirming her age, despite an investigation confirming she was a minor and that her marriage certificate had been forged. On July 24, 2026, the same court agreed to hear a review petition that could return Maria to her family.

The case reflects a pattern ADF says it has seen repeatedly: more than 1,000 underage girls forced into conversion and marriage each year in Pakistan, following a consistent script of abduction, forged documents and courts that fail to protect children. ADF International has represented others through the same ordeal — Reeha Saleem, abducted at 16 and later freed after her marriage was annulled, and Maira, a 14-year-old freed with ADF’s support. There are signs of movement: in April 2026, Punjab passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act, raising the minimum marriage age to 18 and requiring courts to prioritize the child’s best interests, and the European Parliament formally called for Maria’s return, with UN experts, EU parliamentarians and UK parliamentarians raising concerns as well.

What it is

Stripped of the docket, ADF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 1993, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, whose own leadership describes it as “the world’s largest legal advocacy organization committed to protecting religious freedom, sanctity of life, freedom of speech, and parental rights” — Michael Farris’s words when he was president and CEO in 2021 (The Christian Post). That year the organization was purchasing Prison Fellowship’s 11.3-acre Lansdowne, Virginia headquarters to anchor its Washington-area expansion. Its critics, including the Southern Poverty Law Center — which designates ADF an anti-LGBTQ hate group, a label ADF disputes — see a very different project (Uncloseted Media). In San Diego in 2026, ADF’s summit drew hundreds of leaders from law, policy, media, business and Christian ministry, with House Speaker Mike Johnson — himself a former ADF attorney — as a featured speaker (Uncloseted Media).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not independently audit ADF’s win counts — the “20 direct victories since 2011” comes from MBC Pathway (whose authors disclose they are ADF-allied attorneys) and the “16 wins plus a role in 83 decisions” from Baptist News Global; both are presented as each outlet’s reporting. It treats the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “anti-LGBTQ hate group” designation as a critics’ characterization, attributed, not as the profile’s own finding. The September 2026 doctor-mandate suit is presented as filed, with ADF’s allegations as reported — its outcome was unknown when this was written. The Erin Hawley judgeship campaign was a reported 2025 possibility, not a confirmed outcome. No budget, revenue or headcount figures are stated, because none appeared in the sources read for this profile. And the “four 2026 wins” one outlet claims for ADF’s legal ministry is not asserted as an exact count, because only three direct 2026 victories (Chiles, B.P.J., Hecox) were verified in full reads.