If you heard about a well-funded right-wing group with a detailed plan to achieve conservative policy goals, you’d likely think of Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation–backed coalition has crafted an agenda for a second Donald Trump term that encompasses some truly unsettling policy ideas, and the amount of negative attention it’s gotten from Democrats, celebrities, and even Trump himself has led its leaders to retreat from the spotlight.

The thing is, there’s a lesser-known organization that’s already been working for decades to reshape America into a Christian nation—and will keep doing so, regardless of who wins the presidential election in November. It keeps racking up wins at the Supreme Court: It’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it may be the country’s most sinister advocacy group that people have never heard of. The law firm, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona, says its work “advances the God-given right to live and speak the Truth” and publicly describes itself as “the nation’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” ADF reported more than $100 million in revenue in both 2021 and 2022.

The organization has already made great strides in implementing its far-right agenda through its work on behalf of Christian fundamentalist, anti-LGBTQ , and anti-abortion plaintiffs. It was integral to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, and now it’s waging war against protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The group’s CEO, Kristen Waggoner, has said she believes that the 2015 marriage equality ruling should be overturned as well.

ADF has also faced scrutiny for apparently manufacturing lawsuits involving Christian wedding vendors who object to same-sex marriage; one such case involving a website designer succeeded at the court in 2023 even though the plaintiff, Lorie Smith, had never designed wedding websites and a potential customer who contacted her turned out to be straight. ADF also seems to have invented a group from scratch to be the plaintiff in an ongoing case about an abortion drug. These actions aren’t illegal, but they are deeply unethical. The group is weaponizing the court system to remake laws despite no actual plaintiffs being harmed. (ADF did not respond to Slate’s multiple requests for comment, made by phone and email, nor did it respond to a detailed list of questions.)

By bringing lawsuits before friendly judges, ADF can shape American society to match its vision for the nation. The group’s individual cases may not appear all that connected, but when taken together, they paint a very clear picture. As Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist at the ACLU, put it, ADF “is using the state to uphold the heterosexual, patriarchal nuclear family as the primary—if not the only—way of living one’s life.”

Here are 10 things we can conclude about ADF’s agenda, based on its lawsuits, model legislation, and comments to the press.

ADF wrote and defended the Mississippi law that the court used to overturn Roe and end the federal right to abortion. Now it’s working on getting courts to agree to federal restrictions on abortion pills and procedures as stepping stones to a national ban.

Cases: Idaho v. United States, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA (ongoing; Supreme Court sent both cases back to lower courts)

Stated goal of the cases: To maintain state sovereignty and protect women and girls. ADF argued that Idaho’s abortion ban doesn’t violate the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act because a fetus is supposedly a patient under the act, to be treated on equal footing with the pregnant woman even if the fetus isn’t viable. In AHM, the group claims that the Food and Drug Administration recklessly removed safeguards on the abortion drug mifepristone and should no longer allow medications prescribed via telemedicine. (The Supreme Court’s June decisions didn’t touch the merits in either case, and litigation continues.)

Key quote: “We do believe at ADF that the Constitution protects the life of an unborn child and that that is in the 14th Amendment.” —ADF CEO Kristen Waggoner to Politico in 2024

Long-term goal: Since two-thirds of U.S. abortions are done with pills, these lawsuits, if successful, would drastically limit abortion access. And based on some of Waggoner’s public statements, ADF, like many anti-abortion groups, wants the Supreme Court to declare, in the long term, that every fertilized egg has a right to life under the 14th Amendment, a legal theory known as fetal personhood, which would ban abortion nationwide and imperil in vitro fertilization.

Anti-abortion advocates falsely believe that emergency contraceptives and IUDs prevent implantation of fertilized eggs (they don’t), which they claim is abortion (it’s not). In the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, ADF represented the Christian-owned business Conestoga Wood Specialties, whose owners objected to the Affordable Care Act requirement that health insurance cover those birth control methods. The Supreme Court sided with the Christian plaintiffs. ADF also represented Christian colleges in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania in a similar 2016 case.

Yet Waggoner told Politico in March that “ADF has never advocated for limitations on access to contraception”—that’s because the organization views emergency contraceptives and IUDs as “abortion-inducing drugs and devices.” (And ADF is arguing in a different case that states should be able to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid, which would affect birth control access for low-income people.)

Cases: Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Burwell........

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