The Independence Law Center has been busy serving up anti-LGBTQ, anti-reading, anti-student policies for school districts throughout Pennsylvania. A few weeks back, Jeremy Samek, lead counselor of the ILC, sat down with James Corrigan at Fox43 in Central PA for an interview.
Samek worked hard to make ILC seem very sane, sensible, and secular:
“Jeremy Samek, senior counselor of the ILC, says the firm’s mission is to draft policies for boards that are fair to all students while maintaining common sense.
‘There’s a lot of things in the culture that people are trying to determine how do we accommodate everybody as best we can.’ Samek said. ‘And these school districts are reaching out to us for help, because they want to find ways to accommodate everybody.’”
At the mention of a “religious motivation” to the ILC’s work, Samek pushed back.
“These policies that we’ve helped schools put into place are not related to religion at all,” Samek explained. “Actually, these are purely based on trying to accommodate and find common ground when it comes to things like sports, or when it comes to things like keeping parents involved in what’s going on with their student at school.”
When asked if the ILC believes in the separation of church and state, Samek says that it is the law of the land.
“There’s an establishment clause in our country,” Samek said when asked whether he believes in the separation of church and state. “There are numerous court cases in various contexts where that would be the case. So the separation of church and state, the Establishment Clause, is absolutely part of our law.”
That is not really an answer, but the picture Samek tried to paint is clear enough, and that is some serious bullshit there. However, it fits well with ILC’s continuing attempt to be more like serpents. But let’s take this a few steps at a time.
The Pennsylvania Family Institute
The Pennsylvania Family Institute was founded in 1989 as a “key strategic voice for the family, and for the Judeo-Christian principles needed for a free and prosperous society.” Their stated mission is to “strengthen families by restoring to public life the traditional, foundational principles and values essential for the well-being of society.” As with many Christianist political groups, they’ve learned to couch their goals in more secular language, but their true nature often peeks through.
Our goal is for Pennsylvania to be a place where God is honored, religious freedom flourishes, families thrive, and life is cherished.
Not just any God, mind you.
The founder, president, and CEO of PFI is Michael Geer. Geer started out as a journalist, including almost a decade as senior news producer at WPXI in Pittsburgh. Geer is a regular voice in conservative meetings, church gatherings, and media coverage. He’s opposed to legalization of marijuana, women’s health care options, non-traditional marriage, and freedom to read for students.
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Geer has created quite an organization to support his conservative biblical worldview. PFI has a variety of related organizations. The Pennsylvania Family Council, which lobbies for the “pro-family goals.” City on the Hill, an annual conference for high school students to “teach worldview principles and develop leadership skills” including topics such as The Case for Life, Christians in the Public Square and Why Religious Freedom Matters. The Church Ambassador Network, aimed at connecting pastors with their local legislators. They even run the Family Choice Scholarships, one of the many organizations that manages and brokers Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) voucher monies.
According to their IRS paperwork, only three employees are paid by this organization devoted to placing their God at the center of Pennsylvania government. One is Geer himself. The other two are Jeremy Samek and Randall Wenger, the lawyers who do the work of the IRC. All three make six-figure incomes from PFI, which in 2022 handled some $3 million dollars.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely that PFI would pay two of its three paid employees to do anything other than advance its goals of making their religious views the law of the state.
Lessons learned
The ILC was set up in 2006 to do pro bono work “that litigates and advocates on behalf of the sanctity of life, marriage and family and religious liberty.” Wenger has been the chief counsel since the center’s inception. He’s a ninth-generation Lancaster County Mennonite who decided early on that he wanted to be a religious liberty lawyer.
Wenger has been to the Supreme Court twice. A decade ago he took Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp v. Burwell to SCOTUS, where it was paired with the more famous Hobby Lobby case that decided that employers’ free exercise of religion allowed them to refuse to provide insurance to cover types of health care with which they disagreed (in this case, birth control).
The group has often teamed up with the Alliance Defense Fund (now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom), another conservative legal advocacy group. They once employed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and have been associated with Amy Coney Barrett, Willam Barr, Mike Pense, and Jeff Sessions. James Dobson was a co-founder.
Back in 2005, ADF worked with Wenger on Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the lawsuit that challenged the Dover school board’s attempt to make intelligent design part of the district’s science curriculum.
They lost.
And in October of 2005, Daniel Burke reported for Lancaster Online about a conference they held called “When Christians and Cultures Clash.” And they shared some of their thoughts.
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“Advocates for gay rights have been described as ‘trailblazing,’” Wenger said. “But I don’t think that’s the right metaphor. I would say ‘quickly going to hell.’”
In a movie shown about ADF, one man said, “There will be no stopping us. In the next few years we will turn this country around.”
The ADF asked ministers and alumni to bring them legal issues to continue that fight. They offered free legal advice and representation to any person or municipality with “a good case.”
Geer told the meeting that people may call them “opinionated zealots,” but it’s up to them to rescue our society from corruption “should the Lord tarry.”
The story does not report that anyone said a word about the separation of church and state being settled law, but Wenger did offer some advice.
The Dover board, Wenger suggested, might have prevailed in their attempt to insert intelligent design in their science class if they hadn’t mentioned their religious motivation in their meetings. “Give us a call” before saying something like that.
“I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.”
His audience likely recognized that as a reference to Matthew 10:16, rendered in the New International Version as “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” It’s a reminder to some certain persons of faith that they don’t owe honesty or straight dealing to the wolves of the secular world. They are to be in this world, not of it, and not bound by same ethical considerations as when dealing with fellow believers.
Serpents and Schools
ILC has been at work for all this time at bringing conservative Christianist rule to Pennsylvania school districts.
In 2012, Wenger worked with ADF to provide cover for a school board in Mercer County that wanted to “solemnize” its meetings with a prayer. That year they were also involved in a dispute between the Harrisburg school district and Child Evangelism Fellowship over release time allowing the group to “feed lunch to participating elementary students (off site) and also feed them truth from God’s word.”
In 2017, ILC teamed up again with ADF for a lawsuit against the Boyerstown Area School District, alleging that the district was promoting sexual harassment of students by allowing trans students to use the locker rooms for their identified gender.
In 2019, ILC took the Mechanicsburg district to court because it was prohibiting students in Christians In Action from handing out Bibles during lunch (the district’s policy banned handing out all non-school literature).
In 2020, they warned 50 Pennsylvania districts that they were illegally targeting students’ religious speech.
They’ve been pretty forward about these activities, but they have been somewhat quieter about their newest work—developing policies for districts that want to get rid of certain books and silence talk about LGBTQ students.
When the Central Bucks district became the poster for right-wing culture panic takeover, launching a batch of anti-LGBTQ, anti-reading policies, members refused to tell non-right-wing members of the board exactly who was “helping” write those policies. It took a deep dig to discover that those policies had come from the desk of Jeremy Samek.
Other districts have worked closely with ILC to draft policies to ban books and trans athletes. When Hempfield’s school board worked on book restrictions and trans athlete restrictions in 2022 and 2023, their board not only used ILC advice for crafting the policies, but met with Wenger in executive session.
The list of ILC clients has grown and grown, but the number of districts that publicly announce that they’re going to hire ILC is very, very short. Still, word is out among conservative board members. South Side Area School District (near Pittsburgh) passed policies in February that require students to participate in sports corresponding to their birth gender, restricts use of locker rooms and restrooms, and prohibits using anything other than the student’s legal name without parental permission, while not requiring staff to honor that parental request. They hired ILC and Jeremy Samek back in 2022. And shortly after this policy passed, Crawford Central in Meadville considered a cut-and-paste version of the South Side policy—without actually bringing up ILC’s name.
So why did ILC come out into the sunlight of a television interview?
As word has spread, more and more members of the public have caught on, and boards that seek to hire or consult with the firm now draw protests, like this one in Penn Manor covered by Lancaster Online (which captured the awesome sign “ILC is Sus”). Or the protest mounted in Elizabethtown and covered in June by James Corrigan, the same reporter that gave Samek a chance to explain away the objections.
So what do the serpents want?
Clearly, they would like the folks in these districts to be less cranky when ILC comes to town. But what else?
Friendly board members have pointed out that all of this policy work is done free of charge to the district, so what’s the big deal? And it’s true that Samek and Wenger are already well paid by the Pennsylvania Family Institute, and PFI’s goal is pretty clear—to make Pennsylvania a Christian state (or at least their idea of a Christian state).
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Rachael Downey Glasoe talked to local reporter Mike Crowley about her concern, and it catches what may be the main point:
“My read on this is South Side (Area) School District is looking for a fight in court and that is what will happen down there,” Glasoe said. “If we look to these as a model, I would say this school district is going to also get a fight — is going to get a big legal fight.”
Well, yes. Somebody wants a legal fight, but I’m not sure it’s any of these local districts. ILC specializes in finding fights they can take to court in an attempt to make their reading of the Bible the law of the land. So perhaps they are simply trolling Pennsylvania for someone who will help them take their fight up the legal ladder.
But Wenger and Samek have been burned before, and may have judged that even in today’s church-friendly court system, it’s better to keep your serpent costume on as you keep trying to bring Pennsylvania school district by school district, to the Lord.
