Really, paramount? You want to do this all over, again?
The Center for Individual Rights, Friedrichs’ legal sponsor, is backed by numerous right-wing foundations, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Randolph Foundation and the Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations (both controlled by ALEC-bankrolling billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife). If CIR’s lawsuit is successful, the relatively modest investment in backing the suit could accomplish what the $60.5 million effort to pass Prop. 32 could not – the erosion of public-sector unions as a political force. (Prop. 32′s opponents were forced to spend about $75 million to defeat that measure.)…
…CIR’s primary client in Friedrichs, the Christian Educators Association International, is run by its executive director, former public school teacher Finn Laursen, from his home in Amherst, Ohio. Positioning itself as a professional teachers association and an alternative to membership in the National Education Association, the CEAI provides some union-like benefits for its members, such as professional liability insurance.
But CEAI also apparently offers its public school teacher members training in how to proselytize their evangelical beliefs to their students. In a video on the website for CEAI’s 40-day seminar in Minnesota called the Daniel Leadership Institute, Laursen says part of the group’s mission is to “change the public education system from within.” Elsewhere on the promotional clip, various California public school teachers are seen praising the retreat for teaching them “how we can share God’s love and truth with our students,” how “to bring them to truth,” and “how to express [the teachers’] Christian lifestyles and biblical values in the classroom.”
In response to a request for an interview, Laursen replied by email, “would love to accommodate, but I am at 40 day teacher training in the wilderness of MN with no phone access…just came out of woods for brief internet access.” He forwarded a copy of CEAI’s press release issued at the time the lawsuit was filed.
Although marbled with phrases about Constitutional rights and personal choice, the CIR lawsuit is clearly about more than the First Amendment. Friedrichs v. CTA comes at a time when California’s Republican Party is shrinking into electoral irrelevance, while at the same time many corporations are pushing Congress to nullify the state’s pioneering laws regulating workplace safety, consumer protection and the environment.
