Rutherford Institute

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Founded in 1982 by constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead, the Rutherford Institute is a civil liberties organization that provides free legal services to people whose constitutional and human rights have been threatened or violated. The Rutherford Institute is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has emerged as one of the nation's leading advocates of civil liberties and human rights, litigating in the courts and educating the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting individual freedom in the United States and around the world.

The Institute’s mission is twofold: to provide legal services in the defense of religious and civil liberties and to educate the public on important issues affecting their constitutional freedoms. In recent years it has broadened its scope of operations and filed amicus briefs alongside the ACLU in Rumsfeld v. Padilla. Nevertheless, its primary focus remains on First Amendment issues, especially those involving the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The Institute offers a free pocket-sized copy of the United States Constitution complete with the organization's commentary at Rutherford.org.

"The Rutherford Institute is one of the nation's premier civil liberties organizations." —Nat Hentoff, nationally syndicated columnist.

"When founding The Rutherford Institute, my goal was to create an organization that would defend people who were persecuted or oppressed without charging them for such services. The Rutherford Institute exists to ensure that people are treated fairly in the courts and are free to express themselves without fear." — John W. Whitehead, President and Founder of The Rutherford Institute

[edit] History

In the wake of his 1981 book The Second American Revolution, which argued for political and judicial activism on the part of conservative Christians, John W. Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute in the basement of his home. He named the institute after Samuel Rutherford, a 17th century Scottish theologian who argued, in a 1644 pamphlet cleverly titled Lex, Rex, that kings must be subordinate to the law, because the rule of kings is derived from men, whereas the rule of law is derived from God. Rutherford's arguments about the authority of kings were quite influential in the development of the concept of the "social contract" by later philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau. Samuel Rutherford was also known for being an opponent of Roger Williams' experiment in religious liberty in Rhode Island. In a polemic against Williams, Rutherford said, "...all the Apostles and Apsotolike Church had but one Religion, toleration of many Religions not being a part of the New Testament liberty...."^[1]

Early members of the Rutherford Institute's board of directors included California millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr,, as well as prominent fundamentalist activists such as Francis Schaeffer and R.J. Rushdoony of the Chalcedon Foundation, a West Coast Christian think tank in which the Christian Reconstructionist Movement was born in the 1960s. The early activities of the Rutherford Institute reflected this, and tended to focus on cases involving public primary and secondary education. It was especially active and often successful in trying to stop condom distribution in public schools, as well as sex education, AIDS prevention programs, and programs that taught certain types of tolerance.

Within a few years, though, Whitehead had begun to move away from the Christian Reconstructionist Movement, disassociating himself from some organizations, such as the Coalition on Revival, and broadening the scope of the Rutherford Institute's interests.

The Rutherford Institute first became widely known to the public at large with the Paula Jones lawsuit against Bill Clinton, which the Institute backed, with Whitehead acting as co-counsel. In recent years, however, the Rutherford Institute has continued to move towards being a mainstream constitutional legal advocacy organization, often seeming to disagree with the likes of the ACLU on little more than the precise boundaries of the Establishment Clause. In addition to the aforementioned brief in the José Padilla case, the Institute has taken a strong stand in opposition to the Patriot Act, argued that Yaser Hamdi deserved due process, opposed student drug testing, and represented Lt. Col Martha McSally in her suit challenging the military policy that required servicewomen stationed in Saudi Arabia to wear the body-covering abaya when traveling in the country. Perhaps most surprisingly, to those who are primarily familiar with the early years of the Institute, editorials on its web site were generally in favor of the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas.