Everyday Heroes
Elaine and Jonathan Huguenin didn’t want trouble. But it found them, and now they’re standing their ground – setting the stage for a landmark case.
Religious liberty and freedom of speech – hallmarks upon which America was founded – are under threat like never before. With the new Obama Administration in Washington firmly committed to advancing the homosexual and “transgender” agenda through “hate crimes” and nondiscrimination laws that carve out protected class status based on sexual orientation and “gender identity/expression,” those who hold to biblically orthodox beliefs on these topics increasingly find themselves under threat of punishment for daring to express an opposing view.
Clearly, when the pro-gay juggernaut collides with religious liberty, there will be one winner and one loser. This is a zero-sum game.
The following story, reprinted with permission from the April 2009 Citizen magazine, recounts the ongoing saga of one young Christian couple who politely declined to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony in New Mexico. A harbinger of things to come, many Christians may, too, find themselves in the cross-hairs of a gay activist movement on the verge of achieving unparalleled political clout – at the expense of fundamental American liberties.
Everyday heroes
Late summer, 2006: Jordan Lorence was at his office in Scottsdale, Ariz., when his bosses at the Alliance Defense Fund approached him with a new project.
“We want you to develop scenarios of the kind of cases we want to go after as a religious-liberties law firm,” they told him. “And then we want you to talk to our phone-intake people and describe to them what we’re looking for so they know.”
As senior counsel, Lorence didn’t have to think long about the request. He told the call screeners—the first point of contact for people who call (800) TELL-ADF (835-5233) needing a good lawyer to help them defend their religious liberties—to expect “an increasing number of right-of-conscience cases of Christian business owners being sued for discrimination because they won’t use their businesses to support same-sex ceremonies.”
Eight weeks later, Elaine Huguenin called with exactly that.
Creative conscience
Elaine, now 25, and her husband Jonathan, 27, run a small photography studio—simply called Elane Photography—in Albuquerque, N.M. The recent college grads and newlyweds set up shop in 2005, and Elaine focused her talents on weddings, engagement ceremonies, family portraits, and high school graduation photos. Under her process, a single wedding might involve more than 1,600 snapshots, narrowed down to 300 or 400 over the next month, which she then polishes and makes available for her clients’ choices.
Before the business was even a year old, Elaine had turned down at least one request to shoot something that made her uncomfortable: A local man shooting a horror film asked her to do a series of gory still shots for his promotions. So when Vanessa Willock e-mailed in September, asking Elaine to shoot her same-sex commitment ceremony in Taos, she politely turned her down.
“She asked me if I would help join them in celebrating their same-sex ceremony and taking pictures,” Elaine explains. “Like she wanted me to participate. That’s kind of how she worded that. I responded by telling her that we are just sticking to the traditional weddings, but thanks for checking out our site.
“It’s not that I have this vendetta against them—we just have chosen not to take pictures of those ceremonies. We are running our own business, so you should have the right to choose, based on your belief system, what you’ll do. The art and photography I do is an expression of me. I like to be creative with things and show emotion in the things I’m catching—I’m not just having two people stand next to each other, smile and say ‘cheese.’ So when I’m putting that kind of effort into it, if I’m being asked to tell the story of something that goes against my belief system, there’s no way I can do that in good conscience.
“I wouldn’t produce the kind of work I normally would because my heart’s not in it. Not that I would intentionally make all the photographs terrible, but there’s a part of me and what I’m trying to say through the camera … it would be like water and oil.”
Escalating Matters
Apparently, that idea didn’t sit well with Willock.
“Not too long after that, I got an e-mail asking me if that meant that I don’t shoot same-sex couples,” Elaine says. “I clarified that by saying we don’t shoot ‘same-sex weddings’—and shortly after that I got a call from the New Mexico Human Rights Commission saying there had been a same-sex discrimination complaint filed against me.”
Elaine’s heart dropped somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes—and when “they said something about finding an attorney,” she got really nervous.
“I said, ‘Oh my goodness, this is big stuff. This is serious.’ ”
So while Willock’s same-sex ceremony proceeded in Taos—with another photographer who cost less than Elane’s Photography would have charged—the Huguenins searched for a lawyer to defend their First Amendment rights against a state that doesn’t even recognize Willock’s union as legal. Friends and family members referred the couple to the Alliance Defense Fund, and Lorence entered the picture.
The weekend before the hearing, Lorence explained over coffee all the ways the case could be settled if they wanted to avoid what was coming their way.
“But I also told them my personal opinion was that God had given them stewardship over their business, and backing down would be bad stewardship,” Lorence says.
The Huguenins agreed—so a few days later, in late January 2008, their hearing proceeded before a single member of the Human Rights Commission, who would then recommend a course of action for the rest of the appointed body to follow.
“I definitely had the feeling of being Atticus Finch,” Lorence recalls, citing the Southern attorney who defended a wrongly accused black man in the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. “This was a travesty of justice. I was defending the good guys, but I knew I was going to get railroaded.
“They are an appointed board set up to find discrimination. Usually their cases are fact-intensive—‘You fired me because I’m black,’ ‘No, we fired you because you’re a lazy slob who never shows up to work.’ But this was law-intensive. There was no dispute about what actually happened, but photography is an intensely artistic medium with a lot of creative judgment aspects to it.”
Willock’s attorney compared Elaine to 1950s-era racists who refused services to blacks; Lorence explained that Elaine’s constitutional rights would be violated if she was forced to use her artistic talents to in ways that transgressed her conscience.
“The ceremony itself communicates lots of messages—same-sex ‘marriage’ is OK, there’s nothing wrong with it, etc. This, to me, was not like dispensing photographs in a carnival booth,” he said. “This was more like, ‘I want to hire you to write a speech in favor of same-sex marriage, and I want you to use all your expertise to make the arguments,’ and then saying someone who refuses to do so in good conscience is discriminatory. To take a business that is essentially creative at its foundation and applying it to put a ceremony and its messages in the best light possible is a huge First Amendment violation. That’s compelling someone to spout a message that they would not, absent the government’s coercion. It doesn’t take into account the big picture.”
Media matters
In April 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission unanimously ruled against the Huguenins, asking them to pay Willock’s $6,600 attorney fee and forcing them to comply with similar requests in the future.
And then all media broke loose.
“I was on Laura Ingraham[’s radio show],” Lorence said. “One day I did 10 interviews in a row. I would put down the phone and look at my computer, and it was off to the next one. Now all the top law professors are debating the First Amendment issues of this case.”
The Huguenins appealed. At press time, the case was pending assignment to a state trial judge in Albuquerque; a court trial is likely to take place later this year. That decision will hinge on how the state defines freedom: The freedom not to be “discriminated” against for any reason, or the freedoms of religion, speech and association outlined in both the U.S. and New Mexico constitutions.
But in the meantime, similar cases are cropping up nationwide.
“We’ve got the Ocean Grove case in New Jersey, where some people wouldn’t rent out a facility for a same-sex ceremony,” Lorence said. “When a counselor at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta referred a client to someone else for ‘lesbian relationship counseling,’ they had her fired. We don’t make this stuff up. These are real people with real problems that we’re defending—and they all seem to have a similar arc, where it’s, ‘You oppose same-sex marriage, you are saying that our relationships are less in some way, so you must be punished.’ It doesn’t seem to matter that there’s a First Amendment that says the government cannot compel speech or curtail freedom of association.”
While some members of the legal community understand how violating a person’s right to their own conscience is bad, most don’t seem to think that right should apply to Christians.
“They never think it’s discrimination if the [campus] vegetarian club turns way the deer hunters and the guys who like to eat at Ruth’s Chris Steak House—that’s just retaining the integrity of the cause that brought the group together in the first place,” Lorence said. “But Christians are just religious bigots. There’s an authoritarianism [the Left] promotes that they are blind to, because they view it as therapeutic. If we punish a bigot, we’re just helping them see the light—so this is a purifying thing. They don’t view this as something that’s reprehensible under our [cultural and legal] tradition.”
Despite that double standard, the Huguenins are committed to fighting on—no matter how uncomfortable the glare of the spotlight becomes.
“In the U.S., we don’t go through that much persecution. We aren’t getting burned at the stake right now,” Elaine said. “But this is persecution for our faith. If we paid somebody off so we wouldn’t have to go through this, it would be backing down. It’s not something that we’re about to do.”
The culture is shifting in a way that redefines the word “tolerance.” At one time, it meant that you simply didn’t interfere with other people’s views when they differed widely from your own; where homosexuality is concerned, in the new millennium, it’s coming to mean you have to wholeheartedly adopt and endorse those views as your own. As a result, Lorence said, how one deals with opposition is a question more and more Christians will eventually be called upon to answer.
“There’s this cultural drift. How do you cope with it when you go out in the world and see how they view biblical truth?” he asks. “Do you become William Wilberforce and fight for it? Do you ignore it, because the only thing that matters is the Gospel? Or do you redefine biblical truth? I just urge people to say, ‘This is where God has placed us and we have to do what’s right’—not pull back, hide in the hills, or become crackpots.
“The Huguenins are people who have realized this is a calling they have to embrace.”
As Elaine puts it: “It’s just something that comes with the territory as Christians.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Alliance Defense Fund by calling (800) TELL-ADF (835-5233), faxing (480) 444-0025, writing 15100 N. 90th St., Scottsdale, AZ 85260, or logging on to www.alliancedefensefund.org
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