The ‘Secret’ Speech Jeff Sessions Gave to a Group of Christian Lawyers

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a legal firm that represents Christians who face religious discrimination — people like flower shop owner Barronelle Stutzman, sued for refusing to arrange flowers for a homosexual “wedding;” T-shirt printer Blaine Adamson, who scored a victory in his case after he refused to promote a “gay pride” event; baker Jack Phillips (the Supreme Court agreed to hear his case), who recently appeared on The View, sued by homosexuals for refusing to provide services for their “wedding;” and former Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran, who said the mayor fired him for criticizing homosexuality.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech at ADF this week, and mainstream media characterized it as “closed-door” and “secret.” It might have been closed-door. It certainly wasn’t a secret.

But when you’re on deadline, any port in a storm.

The Federalist published the entire speech on Thursday. An excerpt:

“This national commitment to religious freedom has continued throughout our history, and it has remained just as important to our prosperity and unity ever since. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited this country, he noted ‘in France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.’

“And of course it was faith that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. to march and strive to make this country stronger yet. His was a religious movement. The faith that truth would overcome. He said that we ‘must not seek to solve the problem’ of segregation merely for political reasons, but ‘in the final analysis, we must get rid of segregation because it is sinful.’ It undermined the promise, as he described it, that ‘each individual has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state…they are gifts from the hands of the Almighty God.’

“So our freedom as citizens has always been inextricably linked with our religious freedom as a people. It has protected both the freedom to worship and the freedom not to believe as well.”

ABC has some explaining to do.

Alliance Defending Freedom to ABC News: Retract defamatory story, issue apology https://t.co/MzxnSzTkhx pic.twitter.com/17PDH4gTGr

— AllianceDefends (@AllianceDefends) July 13, 2017

Photo credit: By Office of the President-elect – https://greatagain.gov/sessions-highlights-6819d2478fc5#.ow7rot78y, CC BY 4.0, Link