The Illinois Family Institute today condemned the Midwest branch of the Anti-Defamation League for lecturing a District 214 School Board candidate because she wrote to pastors appealing for support as a “Christian engaging the culture.” 

At issue is a letter that candidate Leslie Pinney wrote to Arlington Heights pastors on March 3, in which she wrote:

“Controversial political issues are being taught and those students with conservative, Christian positions are being labeled as intolerant and hate-filled. We must hang on to our freedoms and our children must not be wronged for their Biblical beliefs. … My position … [would be] one of bringing my Christian beliefs into all decision-making while on the board. This means carefully weighing all decisions and votes, praying about them … and providing the best stewardship of the tax dollars the community provides to us.”

In response, Daniel Elbaum, Midwest Civil Rights Counsel for the ADL, warned Pinney in a March 17 letter: “we strongly believe that appeals to voters should never be based on race, religion, or national origin. Such appeals are inherently divisive and foster the notion that a candidate’s race, religion or national heritage can somehow substitute as a shorthand summary of a candidate’s qualifications… We urge you to refrain from political appeals based on religious faith.”

IFI Executive Director Peter LaBarbera said Pinney did absolutely nothing wrong by informing potential supporters of her faith perspective, and said the ADL letter is “part of the Left’s long campaign to intimidate Christians and other people of faith from involvement in the public square by misapplying Jefferson’s ‘separation-of-church-and-state’ doctrine.” 

“How can it be that our tax-funded public schools have become ‘safe zones’ for radical secular ideologies such as the teaching of values-free sex-ed and the celebration of homosexuality, yet religion must be locked out of our schools?” he said. “Such thinking would have been alien to our Founding Fathers, who championed the role of Christianity in government and aimed for freedom of religion-not freedom from religion.”

LaBarbera said two factors are at work in the ADL’s targeting of Pinney for criticism:

1) The ADL’s discriminatory and hyper-secularist misinterpretation of the “separation of church and state,” which distorts the Constitution; and

2) The ADL’s and the Left’s new political tactic of divorcing morality from traditional Christianity and faith perspectives. The goal is to highlight “Christian” and religious support for heretofore anti-religious causes like abortion and homosexual “marriage,” thus implying that there is NO Judeo-Christian consensus on moral issues. Hence, candidates such as Pinney who apply their faith to traditional moral positions like right- to-life and opposing the promotion of homosexuality in schools are vilified.

“The ADL’s unstated goal is to ostracize candidates who bring a traditional Christian or religious worldview to the public debate,” LaBarbera said. “They fear greater involvement of faith-based conservatives in politics, and obviously have singled out Leslie Pinney because, like President Bush, she talks honestly about her faith rather than hiding it in the closet.”