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July 11, 2025 - Epoch Times
49:34
The CCP’s Long Arm Targeting a Religious Group in America: Justin Butterfield and Lea Patterson
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For decades, we've been reporting on the extreme way the Chinese regime crushes the religious freedom of its citizens.
But in recent years, the CCP has been escalating its tactics against religious minorities here on American soil.
That's their mentality.
They get to do around the world what they do internally, and that's what they're trying to do through this law affair.
If the Chinese Congress Party is able to discredit those who want to discredit it, then it can use that to justify persecution that it has committed against many religious minorities, including Felun Gong.
In this episode, I'm sitting down with religious freedom lawyers Justin Butterfield and Leah Patterson to understand what's going on, including their response to a recent lawsuit against Shen Yun, the performing arts company founded by Falun Gong practitioners in New York.
The case touches on vital questions about what it means to be able to practice your faith and guide the education of your children in America.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Justin Butterfield, Leah Patterson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you for having us.
So I've come to deeply appreciate the U.S. Constitution, and it's no surprise to me that the First Amendment of the Constitution speaks of freedom of speech, freedom of religion.
But ultimately, how I view it is it's freedom of conscience.
And that, to me, I've come to believe is the fundamental human right.
And I know that you share this view, but I'd like you to actually explain it to me in a deeper way today.
That's exactly right.
You know, freedom of conscience is fundamental to all other rights that we enjoy as Americans.
If the government can tell you how you can think, then it doesn't matter if you have freedom of speech, what you talk about, freedom to vote, how you vote, because all of those other freedoms are ultimately tied to the freedom to follow your conscience, to follow your religious convictions, to follow those deepest parts of yourself that tell you what's right and wrong.
You know, one of the reasons why both of us wanted to become part of religious liberty litigation is because of the importance of defending that right.
You can't just leave it and expect it to still exist unless you defend it, you work to move it forward, to make sure that that fundamental promise that all of us as Americans have the right to follow God as we understand him and without facing the idea that the government can declare you a heretic.
That's completely antithetical to what American law is.
And the benefits of religious liberty resulted in a freer and better society.
And, you know, I was shocked when I heard that the Chinese Communist Party used the actual word heresy for religious groups that they disagree with, that don't, you know, bend the knee to the Chinese Communist Party.
It's shocking when you see other governmental organizations that really are putting themselves in the place of God.
They're saying, you know, I am the ultimate arbiter of what is correct views about religion, correct views about, you know, the ultimate things of life, the things that are foundational to everything that you are.
In the United States, the government doesn't try to put itself into that place.
Whereas in other countries, unfortunately, they do.
I want to offer a few examples of how this Chinese Communist Party approach to dealing with heretical religions, to use the term that you just offered, like Felon Gong, manifests here, right?
So the case in point example is you have people who are Chinese government agents bribing an IRS official who is actually an FBI, an FBI sting operant, to remove Shen Yun's tax exempt statuses, 501c3 status, basically to cause them problems, to prevent them from being able to do what they are constitutionally allowed to do.
There's multiple examples of Chinese Christians, Uyghurs, Tibetans being harassed, being attacked, again, by proxies of sort of the regime, whether direct, whether overt or not as overt.
How does the law look at that here?
You know, it's interesting.
I had worked several years ago on a matter where some Chinese Communist Party officials were visiting Houston, and there was a route they were going to travel along, and some members of the Falun Gong were going to be protesting them on that route.
And they'd booked a set of rooms at a hotel.
And the Chinese Communist Party called the hotel and got the hotel to kick out all the Falun Gong members and basically got the hotel to do their dirty work of saying, you're not allowed to stay here because of your religious beliefs.
And that's shocking to us.
And that should be shocking to us, right?
We have this idea that all faiths need the protection of law, have the protection of law.
And I think that the Chinese Communist Party is, A, not used to that, right?
They're used to here are the religions that we accept, and we can do whatever we want with the religions we don't agree with.
And they come to America and they just presume, well, these religions are minority religions.
So nobody in the United States will have a problem with our bullying them, or we'll be able to get our way.
In this situation, once we notified the hotel that, hey, here are several federal laws that you may have just violated by kicking these people out of your hotel because of their religious beliefs, the hotel reversed their decision.
And I think that that idea that all faiths in the United States are so protected and are equally protected, that we don't have favorites.
We don't have the government saying, you're a good religion, you're not a good religion, you're a religion that says nice things about the government, so we're going to let you have peace.
But you protest too much, so we're not going to tolerate your existence.
That idea is so foreign to us.
Now, unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party, I think, has been getting wise to the idea that we can't just bully them directly through the law.
So now we have to smear them in some way and do an end run around the religious liberty protections.
But ultimately, as in the case that Leah and I have been working on recently, they just can't get away from trying to sue over everyday religious activities that are protected and thoroughly protected in the United States.
How is this end run attempted exactly?
I mean, just more in a broad sense.
There's a lot of ways.
And, you know, what we're seeing in this kind of case is trying to limit the definition of what religion is, what religious exercise looks like.
You know, if you narrow it into just certain things that look a certain way, then it makes it easier to restrict.
So that's one of the arguments that we've been seeing.
For example, the idea of relegating Falun Gong to being a political movement is an example that we've seen, when that's not at all what it is.
That's like saying that the Catholic Church isn't religious because Pope John Paul II was instrumental in defeating communism in Poland.
So the Catholic Church is still just as religious because the principles were opposed to communism.
We can't speak to or speculate about what the individual motivations of any particular plaintiff is in bringing a lawsuit, but the effect certainly serves the purposes of religious oppression that China has been trying to accomplish.
Because if the Chinese Communist Party is able to discredit those who want to discredit it, then it can use that to justify persecution, justify the terrible persecution that it has committed against many religious minorities, including Falun Gong.
And that's why it's so important to fight for that religious liberty here, that it's not just that other beliefs are tolerated.
It's that it's a fundamental part of who we are as a nation to tolerate people who are different from ourselves and to have value in the exchange of that.
That's the beauty of America, is learning from other people and other people's beliefs and building something better out of it.
But if China can use essentially smear campaigns to discredit people at home, it justifies what they do.
And thankfully, we are a nation of laws.
When you have these attempts to intimidate Falun Gong or anybody else that China has in their targets, when you fight back and you win in court and you show, look, this was a bunch of hot air.
We can win this.
Then the guy who's just standing at the street corner in New York handing out flyers and somebody comes along and intimidates him into stopping, he can look and then see, hey, I actually can fight this.
And importantly, the government officials who may not really be familiar with what the bounds of religious liberty are, what does the Constitution actually say about this situation, they've probably heard about this case that's been going on.
They can say, oh, you know what?
I probably shouldn't listen to this guy that's telling me, hey, I need to ban them from handing out their religious literature.
That's in fact unconstitutional, and I could get in trouble for doing that.
So it has an educational effect, not just on the people who are directly involved, but on the people who are there enforcing our rights and hopefully protecting our rights day in and day out.
The local police officers, the local government officials.
It seems to me uncontested that this freedom is the deepest here in America compared to anywhere else.
And all the other democracies actually have some kind of model that follows the American model.
Really, no other country in the world has the same depth of protections that we have in the United States under the First Amendment.
Even other Western democracies, without that explicit protection for religion, for speech, for the ability to assemble and petition the government, without those explicit protections, over time, those concepts can fade away.
The United States alone really values those first among all sorts of civic theories.
And the idea of religious pluralism, of not having a state-mandated faith, was revolutionary in 1789 when the Constitution was, the idea of it was being made.
And before, the idea was that a nation could only function if it had a unified religion.
And seeing what America has done with it, what we have become as a result of tolerating each other's faith and recognizing that some things are just off limits from the government is really wonderful.
This is kind of lost on some people that I spoke in.
It was something that I hadn't really considered deeply, that there were so many different faiths that came here, mostly variations of Christianity, but they had pretty dramatically different views on how to live that.
And in some cases, and the founders understood that one group would be interested in imposing its view on others, and they built the system to deal with that problem.
It's in our DNA, right?
Because if you look at some of the earliest settlers, the pilgrims, they were leaving Europe because they were rejected by the religious communities of the countries they were from.
You know, in England, they didn't fit within the established Church of England thought as to what a Christian should look like.
And so they came first to Holland and then to America, and they brought that ideal that we want this to be a place where people are free to worship God according to their own conscience.
It's kind of obvious when I say it, but I hadn't thought about it this way, that what the approach towards faith in communist China is basically antithetical to the approach to faith in the United States.
And so it's particularly noxious when that approach is brought here.
In China, you have the government, and then you have your relationship with God below that.
And they expect your relationship with God to be subservient to the state.
In the United States, we understand that people's relationship with God is the most important thing in their life, and their relationship to the state is subservient to that relationship with God.
The way China is trying to use laws in the U.S. to kind of enforce their own internal law here outside of their country to eradicate people that they've decided to eradicate around the world.
You know, it makes me think of the Chinese government's opening a police station in New York to enforce their local laws.
But that's their mentality, that they get to do around the world what they do internally.
And that's what they're trying to do through this lawfare.
They're trying to target the same groups that they would target in China just here in the United States.
They're trying to impose their own concept of what is legal, what is right, what is orthodoxy.
There's no civic orthodoxy in the United States, but they're trying to foist that idea upon us here.
You know, it also strikes me that with the police station example, right, when the police station gets put up first, it doesn't call itself a police station.
It's a community center, right?
And then it starts exerting influence and exerting pressure in various ways and a kind of political correctness at first.
And this is your point about the pushback is so important.
If there's no pushback, then it takes a little more.
If there's no pushback, and it just sort of grows.
And eventually you get something that's a lot closer to a police station because people said, ah, it's just the Chinese figuring out things for themselves, you know, or something like that.
You've done a lot of cases related to revoking this 501c3 status, nonprofit status, or preventing people from groups, religious groups from getting nonprofit status.
It's very interesting, actually, when I think about it, that these particular Chinese agents tried to use this method, which is the exact method that often is used by overzealous secularists or something like that, right, to try to impinge on freedom of religion of Christians, for example.
That's curious.
Yes, absolutely.
One of the cases that I was involved in before is a Christian voter guide kind of organization, nonpartisan, providing information on elections, how to get registered to vote.
And the IRS initially denied their 501c3 application, saying because they had a statement of faith that was based on biblical principles, that it was too political because the Bible is Republican.
Now, the IRS reversed that, thankfully.
But that idea that your religion can't inform your political views is completely wrong.
And if you have the government deciding that something is too political for religion to have anything to do with, then that's the government defining what religion is and what it can mean to someone.
There are people of faith across the country, probably on both sides of the aisle, whose faith informs what they vote for and what policies matter to them.
And it's very crucial for the government to respect that.
And for an idea of how wrong that is in the United States, after this came out, the IRS actually called the founder of the organization within, what, two weeks?
Two weeks.
And apologized.
When have you heard of the IRS apologizing?
I know, I know.
This further dimension with the Chinese Communist Party sort of bringing its long arm of repression to America is by finding these kind of fellow travelers, right, who also have some kind of issue with religion or they don't like, they believe that maybe they know better about how people should think.
So they want to be able to help them think the correct way.
I still, I find that a very difficult viewpoint, but there's apparently people that think this way and are happy to impose those views.
This is what's been keeping me up at night, right?
We talked about the Chinese Communist Party is starting to kind of get wise, right?
And realizing they can't just directly bully people.
So they've got to find ways to besmirch them.
Here's somebody who is a secularist or is anti-faith or dislikes this group that the Chinese Communist Party also dislikes.
So we'll throw some money at them and get them to put up YouTube videos or make posts attacking this group and increase that influence of the Chinese government here.
Well, you have this Chinese United Front, right?
These are kind of one of the key methods of these influence operations overseas.
It's tens of billions of dollars.
There's just this kind of huge machinery that's in play.
Like, for example, right, when I've been seeing these cases, some of these hit pieces written against Shen Yun, all that stuff gets instantly translated and then broadcast, you know, ad nauseum via these propaganda channels that the regime is, you know, basically in-country controls all of, but also has, you know, huge megaphone outside.
Absolutely.
I mean, anyone can say anything as soon as people hear all sort of, you know, accusations, things that sound scary, you know, you don't know whether they're true or not, but you've heard them.
And it is unfortunately an effective strategy in many cases.
Well, so I think this is the point where we can talk about Sun v Shen Yun, which is the case that you're working on.
You've just submitted this motion to dismiss.
This is what brought you to my attention.
And it kind of strikes me a little bit in the vein of what you were just talking about for your argument.
Essentially, it's a lawsuit filed by former Shenyun dancers.
They left Shenyun in 2015, I believe.
And they've brought human trafficking claims.
As soon as you hear that, right, it sounds bad.
It sounds scary.
But ultimately, they don't make out a viable legal claim at all.
And it essentially amounts to if your parents enroll you in a religious school and that school has rules that are consistent with the faith, such as limiting time on the internet or limiting access to pornography.
That was actually one of the complaint, the allegations in the complaint was complaining that the students couldn't freely access pornography.
Well, of course, that's good parenting.
Parents should not be allowing children to see that, and neither should a school that's responsible for them.
The complaint makes claims like, well, you gave us flip phones and not smartphones.
We weren't able to play video games.
And so the average person who just reads the headline, right?
Shin Yun sued under federal law fighting human trafficking thinks, oh, there's going to be, you know, what are they doing there?
And you have to really look at the details.
Oh, they limited my time on the internet.
It's really just absurd.
Could you just please walk me through some of the strongest arguments in the motion?
For context, at a motion to dismiss stage, when we're writing the brief, we can't argue about whether the allegations are true or not.
That's something that happens if a motion to dismiss fails.
So we have to say, taking the complaint as it is, does it make out a plausible violation of law?
An argument is that it does not.
There are a lot of reasons for that.
The kinds of things that the plaintiffs are alleging happen are not the kind of things that the TVPRA actually encompasses.
The TVPRA requires that the plaintiffs show they were threatened with serious harm in order to stay in the situation, basically.
And there are cases that establish that serious harm does not include religious harm.
And the reason for that is otherwise a TVPRA would be capable of applying to otherwise completely lawful religious activity.
So, for example, if that was cognizable as a legal claim that someone allegedly said you might go to hell for XYZ violation of doctrine, then every church is violating that statute, right?
That's the part of religious liberty is protecting the idea that you can believe that your faith has eternal consequences.
And that's just not the kind of conduct that the TVPRA is designed to get after.
So that's kind of part one of the argument is that the kinds of things they complain about are not illegal things, that they're not things that are problematic from the standpoint of the TVPRA.
Some of the plaintiff's allegations are that, well, we have a strict schedule.
We wake up early and we do our school and then we have to practice and then we practice our faith.
We have some time set aside for spiritual development and then we have to practice our performances more.
And it's a busy, packed schedule day in and day out.
But if you think about it, look at what high-level gymnasts, high-level ballet schools, so many Olympians, they homeschool for a few hours every day and they spend the rest of the time perfecting their performance.
And here, similarly, they are committed to being high-level performers.
They joined these schools.
They worked with Xin Yun because they wanted to be high-level dancers.
They wanted to be able to do these traditional Chinese dances at a very high professional level.
And that requires dedication.
They made that choice.
And now they're complaining about the dedication that getting there requires.
And in fact, you know, these particular plaintiffs persevered over years and multiple failed auditions because they wanted to be accepted to Feitan Academy and to ultimately be able to perform with Shen Yun so badly that they persevered in seeking this level of performance.
And it's pretty much what you would expect from a higher performance ballet school.
Really, fundamentally, the things that they are complaining about and calling human trafficking are volunteering for your religious organization, attending a religious boarding school, things that happen in hundreds of thousands of religious communities all across the United States every day.
I think if you told churches that having a missions trip, having the church youth group go and build a house for a poor person might get you sued under a human trafficking statute, I think they would be shocked.
Right, but that's a great example.
That's exactly the kind of thing which is the sort of thing that Shen Yun is being accused of.
It shouldn't be controversial.
But when you stamp that label on it, suddenly it sounds much more controversial than it is, even though people volunteer at their churches all over the United States every day in this country, and we don't see lawsuits against them.
Unfortunately, that is the sort of thing that's at threat from this lawsuit.
And you look at the complaint against Shen Yun, and if you were to replace all of the word Falun Gong with the word Christian or Catholic, it would be completely unremarkable, the activities that they're complaining about.
You expect a Catholic boarding school to follow Catholic doctrine and to require a code of conduct that's consistent with that.
But that's one of the reasons why it's so important To protect religious liberty for everyone is that the burden falls hardest on religious minorities whose faith is less understood by the majority of people and even potentially less understood by the court.
That's why the government can't require religion to look a certain way or to have certain principles or have certain rituals, for example, because those protections are the most crucial for people whose religion is less understood.
You know, I found myself a few days ago in the home, Montpellier, the home of James Madison, at the desk where he wrote many parts of what became the Constitution at some point.
And I was thinking to myself about Federalist 10.
This was very instructive to me that in America, there's this, I had never thought about the idea even of the tyranny of the majority.
And it's actually a difficult issue to deal with in democracies, right?
That you could have one group that imposes its will, and it's the majority.
So it's a democracy.
Isn't that fair?
Isn't that reasonable?
Well, no, in Republican democracy, you try to actually prevent that from happening and give the minorities their opportunity.
It's just a beautiful thing that, again, I think many of us haven't really had a, we don't realize how there isn't a perfect solution to it, but there's kind of the best trade-off, I guess, that we're aware of is what's found in the U.S. Constitution.
What's that old joke about, you know, a democracy is ten wolves and a sheep.
A republic is ten wolves and a sheep voting about what to do, but the sheep is heavily armed.
The goal of the Constitution is to give that legal arms to the minority to make sure that everybody's rights are respected and that, you know, we don't have ten wolves voting on what to do with the one sheep.
You know, the legal protections mean the most for those who don't have the democratic wherewithal to protect themselves.
And, you know, you see this claim a lot come up, right?
Like, well, speech should be free as long as you're not saying anything too controversial, too harmful.
But what is controversial speech?
What is harmful speech?
It's speech that the majority doesn't agree with.
Those are the places where the protections for free speech are most important.
It's not the ideas that everybody agrees with.
It's not the beliefs that everybody hold.
It's not the things that everybody does that needs protection.
Those don't have to worry.
You don't have to worry about those.
It's the controversial ideas.
It's the ideas that are held by a few people.
It's the speech that the majority views as dangerous.
Those are what need the protection because those are the ones that are going to be attacked by the majority.
You have to ask who decides what's harmful in terms of speech.
Well, right.
And I mean, and again, it's not this First Amendment, right?
It's speech and conscience and faith.
They're all tied so deeply together and the ability to exercise it in a public way, right?
I guess all those things are so deeply tied together.
So how does one, and I, and of course I've read both the complaint and your response to the complaint, your motion to dismiss.
It made me wonder, like, how is it even possible for someone to put in a complaint like this when it well, you can sue anyone for anything.
That doesn't mean it has any water.
So, you know.
Is this a problem?
I mean, oh, yes, actually.
It is.
I mean, in the legal system, is it like there's no boundaries on this at all?
Pretty much, you know, the limitations, there are a few limitations.
And the first one is, can you get a lawyer to represent you?
Although even that's not necessary.
It's true.
We were just talking about some people that we've seen who, you know, one person filed a lawsuit, a pro se person, that means a person who was representing himself, did not have a lawyer, but sued George Washington, the Declaration of Independence.
The Founding Fathers.
And the Founding Fathers collectively.
Yes.
Now, you know, I think anybody that reads that is going to think that's just absurd.
But anybody, as Leah said, anybody can sue anybody for anything.
The court had to read it and write an opinion about why that's a frivolous lawsuit and it was being dismissed.
But that's how the process works.
So, you know, when you see that someone who sued someone, you have to ask why and is it valid?
Well, so, and this actually reminds me of another type of lawfare which has been used against Shenyun.
There was this, you know, kind of transplant guy lives in China for a decade, lands in the area where Shenyun is located and the dance school is located, and starts launching environmental lawsuit after environmental lawsuit.
After a lot of money and a lot of concern and a lot of bad press, right, which was unfounded, it turns out the judge dismisses it with prejudice.
So now he's not allowed to file this anymore.
But I was trying to figure out how is it that this person could do that in the first place?
You're kind of giving me some of the, you already gave me some of the answer.
But if someone targets you, I mean, this is expensive.
This is distracting.
They are.
It is.
And, you know, that kind of lawsuit is something that we've seen throughout our practice against many different faiths.
You see it often against Jewish synagogues, especially the Orthodox synagogues that have to be walking distance from everyone because no one can drive on the Sabbath.
And a lot of times when we see cases where either an HOA or the town zoning board doesn't want to let those people, if you will, into the neighborhood and they'll throw, you need this amount of parking, you need fire sprinklers, you need all of these environmental impact surveys.
And it eats up a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money with the ultimate purpose of that organization failing.
And so we see that all of the time.
But there are, thankfully, federal statutes like the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, ARLIPA, which protects religious uses of land and provides some relief and a bit of backstopping against the power of zoning boards.
And I had one case representing an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in North Dallas.
And there was one neighbor who really didn't want them being in his community.
And he first got the HOA to go after them.
HOA?
A homeowners association.
Yes.
He became president of his local homeowners association and used that homeowners association to try to kick them out.
And when that failed, he then wrote a bunch of demands to the city and tried to get the city to kick them out.
And I'll never forget, we went to the hearing, one of the earlier hearings in this and the Homeowners Association.
They brought this witness on who testified that the problem with allowing an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in the community was that one of their members was blind and would have to cross the street.
And it's just not right to allow people who are blind to cross the street.
And also there were mothers pushing their children in strollers, and that shouldn't be allowed either.
And it's just these absurd, like if it were any other context, nobody would give it the light of day.
But they actually got an attorney to bring this claim against this Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
And so, you know, we came alongside that Orthodox Jewish synagogue and we helped them and they're still there today.
We got through all that.
But there are a lot of people who will try to find every little nitpicky statute, even in situations where they just don't make sense, and try to use that to beat people out of their community that they don't like.
So we talked about the ability in the U.S. legal system to launch perhaps what I would characterize as incredibly frivolous lawsuits and have to go through that.
That's part of the.
But what about lawsuits where the statute of limitations has expired?
So that's one of the interesting things about Sun Vi Shen Yun is that they waited so long to bring their lawsuit.
So statute of limitations is a principle by which when you're bringing a lawsuit under a law, they have a time limit.
Like you have to bring the lawsuit within a certain amount of time, or we say that the statute of limitations has run.
And in this case, the plaintiffs in Sun Vi Shenyun waited 10 years before they brought their lawsuit.
And not only did they wait 10 years to bring these claims, but if you look at what they did in the intervening time, you know, after performing with Shen Yun, after attending Fei Tian Academy, they went back and they volunteered with Shenyun present with the Shenyun presenter.
And it seems like sometime over the past 10 years, something's changed in their lives.
And now they're viewing the past through a very different filter.
And, you know, one of the things that struck me in the complaint is, you know, the plaintiffs talk about how they and their parents, you know, they wanted to apply to Feitian Academy.
They wanted to ultimately succeed in performing the Shen Yun because it was important to them as part of their faith, a crucial component.
That's the phrase that the complaint uses, spreading and sharing with other people the message of truth, forbearance, and compassion.
And that's what they aspired to do is to perform as part of that important religious mission.
And even after leaving, they continued to volunteer.
So, you know, who can say what changed, but the length of years is very positive.
And, you know, ultimately, none of the things that they talk about in their complaint happened within the past 10 years, which is the statute of limitations for the TVPRA, the federal law under which they filed their suit.
Which is even quite a long statute of limitations.
It is quite a long statute of limitations.
Yeah, most laws have a much shorter statute of limitations.
So even with its longer statute of limitations, they still waited.
From what I can tell, you both have kind of your dream job, kind of like I do, actually.
You get to work on something that you're deeply passionate about.
And maybe, Aalia, I'll start with you.
Like, how is it that you came to do this work and be so deeply involved emotionally and spiritually?
Well, that starts, you know, in my teenage years with my own faith.
And I'm very grateful that my career was able to take the path it did.
I would say that's the grace of God because it's been wonderful to be part of something that I care about, that makes a difference for my clients.
My favorite cases that I've worked on were both cases dealing with retirees in senior apartment complexes.
And they were told that in the common room where you could have birthday parties, bingo, things like that, book clubs, you couldn't have a Bible study.
For a lot of these people, they're disabled.
They don't have transportation, can't get out to go to church.
And that's all they had was that Bible study on Wednesday night.
And being able to come alongside those wonderful people and learn from people who had been faithful to their faith longer than my parents had been alive was just the favorite cases I've gotten to work on.
And I really want that for everyone to have that freedom to exercise what they believe and to share it.
You've actually done this type of litigation at the Supreme Court.
So tell me a little bit more about your path here.
You've been a little overly humble here, I think.
That's very kind.
Well, in terms of education, I went to Texas Christian University for my undergraduate degree and then to the University of Virginia School of Law.
Then I went to clerk for Judge Grunder on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis before I went to First Liberty Institute, which is a nonprofit that does religious liberty work.
And I spent almost seven years doing litigation there before Justin and I founded our own firm last year.
And while I was at First Liberty, I did have the opportunity to work on a team that was litigating Carson versus Macon, which was a Supreme Court victory in 2022 for school choice.
I'm particularly passionate about the importance and protecting religious education because that's the education that my parents sacrificed to give me.
And it helped make me who I am and give me the tools that I needed to be successful.
And the Carson case was out of Maine.
And Maine's very rural and many school districts don't have the population sufficient to support having a high school.
So what the state law has been, goodness, for decades, almost 100 years, is that the parents in a district like that that doesn't have a high school could send their child to the public or private school of their choice.
But after 1980, they couldn't send their child to a religious school.
So you could send a child to a secular private school, but not to a religious school.
And it actually, the result of that change in policy resulted in the, I think my recollection is the largest Catholic school in the state transitioned to being a secular school because they wouldn't have been able to operate without the tuition funding.
And multiple cases over the years challenged that law.
And where that law was coming from is this idea that if the government provides any support, no matter how indirect, to a religious organization, that that is violating the Establishment Clause.
And that's simply not where the law is now.
There's many, many decades of Supreme Court decisions have established that when you have a system of private choice, where you're taking a generally available benefit, something that's available to everyone, and you say, you can use this as long as you don't do something religious with it, as long as you don't give it to a religious school, that's discriminatory.
And it really is ultimately hostile to people of faith to say, we'll support whatever you want to do as long as it doesn't have anything to do with religion.
But if everyone has the same opportunity to use the same benefit the way they see fit, then that's not a decision that's attributable to the government at all.
It's not the government saying, you have to go to Catholic school.
It's the government empowering parents to say, here's what's best for my child.
Here's the education that will fit us and our family best.
And that's the principle that the Supreme Court vindicated in Carson striking down that law that had been on the books for, I believe, almost 40 years at that point.
And Leah, before I jump to Justin, just remind us what the Establishment Clause is.
Sure.
It is part of the First Amendment.
So the text of, we call them the religion clauses.
You have the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.
So the text goes, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
So the first part is the Establishment Clause.
Well, fantastic.
And so, and Justin, similarly, tell me a little bit about, you know, where you come from, how you came to do what you do and with the passion that you bring to it.
Sure.
So like Leah, my drive is my faith.
When I was in high school, I was homeschooled.
And, you know, Texas is a very homeschool-friendly state, but I would read articles about homeschooled families in other states that were less willing to accept their parents' religious right to direct the education of their children, treating homeschooled families, you know, like child abuse, basically.
And so I wanted to stand up for those people who were being persecuted because they were following their conscience, following their faith in how they treated their family and how they raised their children.
And I actually did not immediately plan to go to law school.
Being a bit of a computer nerd, I actually got a bachelor's degree in computer and electrical engineering and decided that it was more fun as a hobby than as a career.
So I then went to law school.
I went to Harvard.
And after graduating, I worked at a business law firm for a couple of years.
But then that desire to help people stand up for the righteous conscience came back.
And I also went to First Liberty Institute and spent seven years there representing people all over the country.
And then some of that work was suing the Department of Health and Human Services.
If you'll recall, a few years back, they had what we called the contraceptive mandate.
And that was a requirement that everybody provide insurance coverage, paid for insurance coverage for their employees that covered all contraceptives, including contraceptives that many organizations viewed as abortifations.
And Hobby Lobby was the famous case, but I represented several religious organizations that didn't want to fund contraceptives or abortifations.
And so I sued HHS a couple of times.
One, and apparently I did a good enough job that they then asked me to come work at HHS.
So I went and first I was senior advisor for HIPAA, and then I became senior advisor for conscience and religious freedom, working to make sure that HHS and their regulations don't violate people's conscience rights, but also to make sure that healthcare professionals, just in general, that their religious beliefs, their conscience rights are protected.
So many people become doctors, become nurses, become pharmacists because they want to help people.
And oftentimes that drive to help people comes from their faith.
There's a lot of people who are doctors because they view that as a practical application of their religious beliefs.
And that's especially true in a lot of rural communities.
do you want to live in the city and get paid a lot, or do you want to go live in the rural community and maybe not make as much, but you're helping people in need?
And so a lot of doctors who choose that path do so because of the drive of their faith.
And when we were starting to see mandates from the government that basically were forcing them to do things that they couldn't do in accordance with their conscience, telling them, you know, well, you have to refer for abortions.
You have to do all these different things.
And if you don't do these things, well, you're just not an ethical doctor.
And so there are federal protections protecting people from having to refer for abortion, perform abortion, participate, things like that, or likewise for euthanasia and other things that people of faith, you know, vigorously object to.
So what we did at HHS in the Office for Conscience and Religious Freedom was, or the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, was we created a framework for those healthcare professionals to make sure that their rights were protected, to be able to bring complaints to HHS and to have somebody who's there standing behind them saying, no, you can't violate their rights of conscience this way.
This is protected.
So that was exciting work.
After my time there was done, I returned to First Liberty Institute and worked on religious liberty cases with them for a few more years.
And then Leah and I started our own firm.
One of the things we noticed was that, you know, there's a lot of support for religious organizations when they have a big litigation.
What I mean by that is when something dramatic has happened to them and they're being told, you know, okay, bake this cake or go to jail or things like that that are flashpoints in their lives.
But there were a lot of religious organizations that were coming to us asking, can we have day-to-day help?
You know, what can we do day-to-day to protect our religious liberty?
Is there somebody that can help us?
And unfortunately, there was a lot less available of that sort of day-to-day help.
So we thought that that was an area where we would be able to help in.
So we started our own firm almost a year ago now.
Well, this has been an absolutely fascinating discussion at so many levels.
A final thought, perhaps, from each of you as we finish up.
Absolutely.
Well, we're just so delighted to be with you and have the opportunity to discuss all of these things.
It's why we do what we do to protect religious liberty for everyone.
And we'll see what the court does in this particular case.
And we're excited to see what the future holds.
Absolutely.
You know, it's everybody, as I'd said earlier, everybody needs protection.
The protections in the First Amendment are really only protections when they're protections of the people who are less understood, who are not the majority, not the dominant group in America.
And Felon Gong is the beneficiary of that, that there are strong religious liberty protections for them.
That if you take the claims in this complaint and you just put any other religion, everybody that reads it would think, oh, this is just the normal things that people all across America do.
But here, the Chinese Communist Party's ideas are getting out there that, well, when the Falen Gong does it, something's wrong with it.
And we just want to show that all religious groups in America need to be treated equally, that the protections that our Constitution provides applies to everybody in this country, regardless of whether, you know, 90% of the people in the country hold to your belief or 5% of people in the country hold to your belief.
You still have that same constitutional protection of your beliefs.
Well, Justin Butterfield and Leah Patterson, such a pleasure to have had you on.
Well, thank you for having us.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Thank you all for joining Justin Butterfield, Leah Patterson, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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