Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon) was an American online organization founded in September 2005 to support the

separation of church and state The separation of church and state is a philosophical and jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the state. Conceptually, the term refers to the creation of a secular sta ...

and to oppose what it perceived as the growing influence of the religious right. It was a project of the

Tides Center Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human ...

, a non-profit organization that funds

progressive Progressive may refer to: Politics * Progressivism, a political philosophy in support of social reform ** Progressivism in the United States, the political philosophy in the American context * Progressive realism, an American foreign policy par ...

groups. However, its funding ran out in November 2007, at which time its blog announced the organization was "taking a break."

Positions

DefCon described itself on its website as ...

Advisory board

The DefCon advisory board included

Bruce Alberts Bruce Michael Alberts (born April 14, 1938, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American biochemist and the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, Emeritus at the University of California, San Francis ...

Francisco J. Ayala Francisco José Ayala Pereda (born March 12, 1934) is a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and former Catholic priest who was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Dav ...

Chip Berlet John Foster "Chip" Berlet (; born November 22, 1949) is an American investigative journalist, research analyst, photojournalist, scholar, and activist specializing in the study of extreme right-wing movements in the United States. He also studi ...

Max Blumenthal Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author and blogger who is the editor of ''The Grayzone'' website, which is known for spreading conspiracy theories and engaging in denial of atrocities committed by dictatorial ...

Erwin Chemerinsky Erwin Chemerinsky (born May 14, 1953) is an American legal scholar known for his studies of United States constitutional law and federal civil procedure. Since 2017, Chemerinsky has been the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Previously, he a ...

Frederick Clarkson Frederick Clarkson is an American journalist and public speaker in the fields of politics and religion. He is the author of ''Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy'' (1997, ); editor of ''Dispatches from the Religious Le ...

, Matt Foreman, Steven Gey,

Ira Glasser Ira Saul Glasser (born April 18, 1938) served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1978 to 2001. His life was the subject of the 2020 documentary '' Mighty Ira''. Early years Ira Glasser was born on ...

Michelle Goldberg Michelle Goldberg (born 1975)"Michelle Goldberg". Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2016. Retrieved via Biography in Context database, January 28, 2017. is an American journalist and author, and an op-ed columnist for ''The New York Tim ...

Isaac Kramnick Isaac Kramnick (March 6, 1938 – December 21, 2019) was an American political theorist, historian of political thought, political scientist, and the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. He was a subject-matter exper ...

Lawrence M. Krauss Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born May 27, 1954) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who previously taught at Arizona State University, Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project, now cal ...

, James M. Lawson Jr.,

Kate Michelman Kate Michelman (born August 4, 1942) is an American political activist. She is best known for her work in the United States abortion rights movement, particularly as a long-time president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Career From 1985 to 2004, ...

Harold Varmus Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He was a ...

, and

Mel White James Melville "Mel" White (born June 26, 1940) is an American clergyman and author. White was a behind-the-scenes member of the Evangelical Protestant movement through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, writing film and television specials and ghostw ...

Campaigns

Left Behind: Eternal Forces Campaign

After Bible publishing company

Tyndale House Tyndale House is a Christian publisher in Carol Stream, Illinois. History Tyndale was founded in 1962 by Kenneth N. Taylor in order to publish his paraphrase of the Epistles, which he had composed while commuting to work at Moody Press in C ...

released the video game version of Tim LaHaye's's ''

Left Behind ''Left Behind'' is a multimedia franchise that started with a series of 16 bestselling religious novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It focuses on a seven-year conflict between the Tribulation Force, an underground network of converts, a ...

'' called '' Left Behind: Eternal Forces'', DefCon asked their members to send emails to

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

CEO Lee Scott to stop selling the game. Wal-Mart stated that it did not intend to comply with the request.

Stem cell research

During the stem cell campaign, DefCon ran two full page ads in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' i
May
an
June
They also released
video on YouTube
featuring DefCon advisory board member and former

NARAL Pro-Choice America NARAL Pro-Choice America, commonly known as simply NARAL ( ), is a non-profit 501(c)(4) organization in the United States that engages in lobbying, political action, and advocacy efforts to oppose restrictions on abortion, to expand access to ...

President

's personal views on stem cell research.

Criticism

DefCon ran ads asserting the involvement of conservative political strategist

Ralph Reed Ralph Eugene Reed Jr. (born June 24, 1961) is an American political consultant and lobbyist, best known as the first executive director of the Christian Coalition during the early 1990s. He sought the Republican nomination for the office of Li ...

, evangelist

Lou Sheldon Louis P. Sheldon (June 11, 1934 – May 29, 2020) was an American Presbyterian pastor, and then Anglican priest, and chairman of the social conservative organization, the Traditional Values Coalition. He principally spoke and wrote about controv ...

, and

Focus on the Family Focus on the Family (FOTF or FotF) is a fundamentalist Protestant organization founded in 1977 in Southern California by James Dobson, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The group is one of a number of evangelical parachurch organizations ...

James Dobson James Clayton Dobson Jr. (born April 21, 1936) is an American evangelical Christian author, psychologist, and founder of Focus on the Family (FOTF), which he led from 1977 until 2010. In the 1980s he was ranked as one of the most influentia ...

in the

Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal The Jack Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal was a United States political scandal exposed in 2005; it related to fraud perpetrated by political lobbyists Jack Abramoff, Ralph E. Reed Jr., Grover Norquist and Michael Scanlon on Native American tribes ...

. Dobson has denied any connection to Abramoff, and a DefCon spokesman has conceded that there was no proof of collusion between Dobson and Abramoff. In response to the ads, Dobson characterized DefCon as "a radical leftist organization," and stated:

"Taking a break"

The last blog post on the organization's website, made in November 2007, read:

We wanted to let you all know that this will be our last blog post, at least for now. Our funding has run out, so we will be taking a break. We want to make it clear that this is in no way an admission of defeat, we’ve had some spectacular successes and it is clear that the religious right is on the run! Thanks to all of you, we’ve been able to fight the teaching of creationism in public schools, fight for stem cell research, run national ads showing Jack Abramaoff’s ties to religious right leaders, and in general shed an important light on the hypocrisy of the religious right. We’re going to leave the thread open for a few weeks so that you all can make connections. We really value this community, and hope to reconnect with you all sometime in the future. Thank you for all you’ve done to help in the fight to defend our Constitution.

References

External links

DefConAmerica.org
(no longer functioning)
DefConBlog.org
(no longer functioning)
Tides Center
{{authority control Political advocacy groups in the United States Church–state separation advocacy organizations Organizations established in 2005 Separation of church and state in the United States