David Fowler President

December 21, 2009

Our legislative successes this year were many. Three standouts include:

Religious Liberty

This year, with the help of your communications with our legislators, our sister political organization, Family Action of Tennessee, lobbied our legislators to pass into law the Religious Freedom Protection Act. In my opinion, this may have been the most important piece of legislation passed this year with respect to those who value their religious liberty.

Just this fall, the ACLU filed yet another lawsuit against one of our state’s school systems—Montgomery County—complaining about an establishment of religion. Can you believe they would include among their “grievances” that a history teacher told his class that America was a Christian nation?!

You may not know it, but in 2008, the ALCU targeted part of its largest fundraising effort in history for expenditure in Tennessee. But with your help, we will be there to sound the trumpet call and to be on-the-ground help to one of our litigation allies, the Alliance Defense Fund.

Right to Life

We were also pleased to engage with many others to help propel Senate Joint Resolution 127 past the first hurdle to getting on the ballot. SJR 127 is the proposed constitutional amendment that would reverse our state Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling that abortion was a fundamental right under our state Constitution!

What a pleasure it was for us to help prepare an outstanding constitutional lawyer from out of state to provide testimony on this court’s ruling. And you can rest assured, the Family Action News pieces we wrote on the efforts to sabotage SJR 127 got noticed. Why, I was even the topic of a House Democratic caucus meeting!

Judicial Tyranny

And speaking of the state Supreme Court, we also were very active in working with legislators to make changes to our process by which those critical judicial positions are filled. While we weren’t able to get back to what we believe the constitution requires—real elections—at least we were able to work with legislators to take the appointment and retention process out of the hands of judicial and legal special interest groups like the Bar Association and the trial lawyers.