The Pattern
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) was incorporated in 1993 and began operating in January 1994 under its founding president, Alan Sears. Three decades later, according to its own financial disclosures, the organization reported nearly $120 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, up from roughly $101.8 million in revenue two years earlier. It closed that fiscal year with just under $100 million in net assets. It is now one of the most active litigants of any kind at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2026 alone it has matters moving through federal courts on transgender athletics, pregnancy-center regulation, and religious hiring, more or less simultaneously.
This is a dossier on how that network is built, what it has won, and where the public record about it is genuinely contested. None of this is a claim about Christianity broadly, or about the evangelical ministry leaders who founded ADF as people of faith. The subject here is one legal organization’s funding, litigation strategy, and public record.
The architecture
ADF was founded by a coalition of evangelical ministry leaders that included James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, and D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, with Sears as its first president, CEO, and general counsel. For its first two decades it operated as the Alliance Defense Fund, funding other attorneys’ cases rather than litigating directly. In July 2012 it renamed itself Alliance Defending Freedom. At the time, ADF framed the change as a matter of clarity, not strategy, saying the new name would help people “easily understand the work that we do” and that “our mission remains the same … Only our name has changed.” In retrospect, the rename also tracked a real operational shift, from primarily funding allied counsel toward filing and arguing its own cases directly. Kristen Waggoner, who later argued Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative v. Elenis before the Court, became ADF’s president, CEO, and general counsel in October 2022, succeeding Michael Farris, who had led the organization since 2017.
The organization today is not one entity but several, each doing a different piece of the same work. Alliance Defending Freedom is the tax-exempt legal arm. Its affiliated advocacy arm, ADF Action, announced a national state-and-federal legislative agenda in January 2026, the same month ADF-drafted state laws restricting transgender athletes’ participation in women’s and girls’ sports were argued before the Supreme Court in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. ADF International is incorporated separately across Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Austria, arguing cases before the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; it currently reports 662 open advocacy matters worldwide, per its own site. Underneath all of it sits a training and staffing pipeline: the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which has run more than 2,600 law students from over 230 law schools through a summer program since 2000, and an “allied attorney” network that Media Matters, drawing on ADF’s own materials, counted at more than 3,300 lawyers who litigate ADF’s cases and strategy without appearing on ADF’s payroll. This is a funded architecture: one legal strategy, funded from one balance sheet. It is distributed across a domestic litigation charity, a legislative-advocacy arm, a separately incorporated international operation, and thousands of affiliated attorneys, so that no single filing reads as part of a coordinated national campaign, even when the campaign is real, disclosed in tax filings, and directed from one headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The record: Masterpiece Cakeshop to Dobbs
ADF’s Supreme Court record includes some of the defining cases of the last decade. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Court ruled 7-2 in 2018 that Colorado had shown impermissible hostility toward baker Jack Phillips’s religious objection to designing a same-sex wedding cake. It was a narrow ruling: it turned on the state commission’s own conduct rather than settling the broader question of whether business owners can be compelled to serve same-sex weddings against their religious objections. Colorado brought a follow-up complaint against Phillips over a later request; ADF represented him again, and the complaint was dismissed by 2024 without reaching the Supreme Court. In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the Court ruled 6-3 in 2023 that Colorado could not compel web designer Lorie Smith to create wedding websites conveying messages she disagreed with; Colorado subsequently paid more than $1.5 million in attorneys’ fees. And in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ADF senior counsel Erin Hawley served as counsel to the state of Mississippi. The case turned on the state’s 2018 Gestational Age Act, a law ADF’s own case materials say its attorneys helped draft and enact. The Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.
Timing the bench
ADF’s cases are frequently built to reach the Supreme Court years before they are decided, and several of its biggest wins landed after the Court’s composition had shifted since filing. 303 Creative was filed in 2016 as a pre-enforcement challenge, meaning Smith sued before Colorado had actually tried to enforce its public-accommodations law against her over a real request. Every appellate judge who reviewed the case agreed that this gave her standing, the legal right to bring the suit. The case was decided in June 2023, seven years later, after three of President Trump’s first-term appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, had joined the Court. Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, the law at the center of Dobbs, was passed in 2018, the year after Gorsuch’s confirmation, and the state’s own brief to the Court asked directly for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, a request legal reporting at the time framed as a test of whether the newly reconstituted Court would rule differently than its predecessors had. This is strategic timing: filing the case, and choosing its legal theory, based on the court it is likely to eventually reach rather than waiting for the dispute to force the timeline.
The narrow claim, the broad message
ADF’s court filings and its public messaging describe the same cases at different widths. In 303 Creative, ADF’s own case materials framed the dispute as reaching both free exercise, the constitutional right to practice one’s religion, and free speech. The Court, deciding the case, expressly confined its ruling to compelled speech, the forced-expression question described above, and the free-exercise claim did not carry. A similar gap runs through how ADF names its own campaigns: its litigation over school sports and facilities policy is organized on ADF’s site under a campaign titled “Winning the Battle Against Gender Ideology,” sweeping, civilizational language attached to cases that, in court, turn on a narrower question, what a specific Title IX regulation permits or requires a specific school district to do. Courts adjudicate the narrow claim in front of them. The wider claim is what circulates in campaign names, fundraising appeals, and press statements. That gap between the two registers is what the motte-and-bailey pattern names: a defensible, specific position for the forum equipped to test it, and a sweeping one for the audience that is not.
The current docket
As of August 2026, ADF has multiple live matters in federal court, split across two fronts. On transgender-athletics and facilities policy: in Little v. Hecox, consolidated with West Virginia v. B.P.J., ADF represented Idaho officials defending the state’s ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s school sports; the Court ruled 6-3 on June 30, 2026, that the ban violates neither Title IX (the federal law barring sex discrimination in education) nor the Fourteenth Amendment, with Justice Sotomayor dissenting in part and Justices Kagan and Jackson joining that dissent. ADF also has an active federal suit in Minnesota arguing that Title IX requires, not merely permits, schools to exclude transgender students from single-sex facilities and teams, a theory it has not yet won outside the states covered by Little v. Hecox. Separately, ADF filed an amicus brief (a filing from outside the case, as opposed to counsel of record, who represents a party directly) rather than appearing as counsel of record in United States v. Skrmetti, in which the Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatments for transgender minors, 6-3, in June 2025.
On religious-liberty and pregnancy-center cases: in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport, the Court ruled 9-0 in April 2026 that a New Jersey pregnancy center ADF represents may pursue its federal challenge to a state subpoena for its donor and counseling records, reversing a lower court’s dismissal on jurisdictional grounds; the underlying dispute over the subpoena itself was sent back for further litigation rather than decided outright. In Youth 71Five Ministries v. Williams, ADF is asking the Court to hear an Oregon youth ministry’s challenge to an Oregon grant program’s rule barring recipients from hiring only people who share their faith, after a divided Ninth Circuit produced conflicting rulings.
The hate-group dispute
The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed Alliance Defending Freedom on its “hate map” as an anti-LGBTQ hate group since 2016. SPLC’s stated rationale cites, among other things, ADF’s support for laws SPLC characterizes as criminalizing same-sex conduct, ADF’s association with legal arguments SPLC connects to forced-sterilization requirements for transgender people’s legal recognition in parts of Europe, and ADF’s litigation seeking to restrict transgender students’ access to bathrooms and school sports.
ADF disputes the designation. On a page of its own site titled “Setting the Record Straight,” ADF states it “has never supported the passage of laws criminalizing homosexuality” and calls the forced-sterilization characterization “utterly and completely false,” saying it mischaracterizes a legal brief concerning European sovereignty rather than reflecting ADF’s own advocacy. ADF argues the SPLC listing reflects disagreement over contested policy questions rather than evidence of hatred, and points to its Supreme Court record and its attorney network as inconsistent with the label. The dispute has had concrete consequences: after Amazon removed ADF from its AmazonSmile charitable-donation program over the designation, then-CEO Michael Farris wrote that SPLC had “devolved into a far-left propaganda machine that slanders organizations with which it disagrees.” ADF has continued to contest the label publicly into 2025, including by co-signing a letter with leaders of other conservative advocacy organizations that characterized SPLC’s list as a politically motivated tactic.
This piece does not resolve that dispute. SPLC made the designation and has published its stated reasons. ADF disputes the designation and has published its own rebuttal, point by point. Both are on the record above, and readers can weigh them against the litigation record documented in this piece independently of the label itself.
Alliance Defending Freedom was not contacted for comment on this piece. Its own case pages, financial disclosures, and its direct rebuttal to the SPLC designation are linked throughout above, and are used here as its stated position wherever it has taken one on the record.
Verdict: Documented architecture. ADF is not one organization but a coordinated structure of legal, lobbying, training, and international entities funded by nearly $120 million a year, filing cases timed to reach courts whose composition has shifted since the filing, and describing its own litigation in broader terms to its public audience than the terms courts actually decide. Every claim above is drawn from ADF’s own filings, financial disclosures, and case pages, from court opinions and dockets, and from attributed reporting. Where the record is genuinely contested, as with the SPLC designation, both sides are stated here and neither is resolved.