If Catholic fundamentalist and dark-money operative Leonard Leo has his way, the conservative Supreme Court he engineered will soon overturn 150 years of precedent and finish demolishing the First Amendment’s wall between church and state. Politico’s Heidi Przybyla continues her stellar reporting on Leo and his deep reach in the conservative legal movement with this story about the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s legal efforts to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School and make taxpayers fund the religious school.
Leo is the founder and former director of the Federalist Society and, thanks to multimillion-dollar campaigns in support of the right-leaning nominees he hand-selects, the architect of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He has also been responsible for reshaping select federal district and appeals courts since the George W. Bush administration. Leonard is at the center of a vast dark-money web that he’s put to work reshaping American society, with the help of his friends on the Supreme Court.
The legal team backing the St. Isidore scheme, Przybyla reports, is the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy and training group focused on “religious liberty” protections, fighting LGBTQ+ equality, and dismantling abortion rights. It is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The ADF has been adept at manufacturing bogus plaintiffs to bring challenges before the courts.
The group has had great success since Leo helped secure the conservative majority on the court just days before the election in 2020, when Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, was rushed into the seat created by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett’s seat is key here, because another force behind St. Isidore’s legal push is the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative. Barrett was a law professor at Notre Dame, where she met and became close friends with fellow professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, who according to Przybyla, “has been the effort’s biggest champion within Notre Dame and working with St. Isidore from the start.”
