Professor Douglas Kmiec holds the endowed chair in constitutional law at Pepperdine Law School in California. He co-authored three books on the Constitution. It is unconstitutional for state entities to impose religious nondiscrimination policies, in Kmiec’s view, as they single out religious viewpoint for disfavor or target religious practice to discriminate against believers without a […]

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a nonprofit educational foundation whose mission is to defend individual rights “at America’s increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities.” FIRE attorneys often help student groups rewrite their constitutions to make them legally defensible and represent student groups in court. Download FIRE’s guides to campus rights. Contact president Greg Lukianoff.

Robert Tuttle is a research professor of law and religion at George Washington University. He co-authored, along with Ira C. Lupu, Secular Government, Religious People.

Attorney Gene Schaerr helped draft RLUIPA, testified on its behalf before Congress and has been heavily involved in defending it.

Marci A. Hamilton is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder, CEO and academic director for Child USA, a nonprofit think tank aimed at ending child abuse. Hamilton, who began her career as a lawyer, is an expert on child sex abuse statutes, […]

John Haught, an emeritus professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that spiritual experiences are connected to the brain processes and dependent on them but not reducible to them. He says it is possible to distinguish between the chemical basis of experiences and the experiences themselves. Life and mind cannot be reduced […]

The Rev. Traci West is professor of ethics and African-American studies at Drew University in Madison, N.J. Among her specialties are welfare policy and justice issues in church and society. She wrote the entry “Agenda for the Churches: Uprooting a National Policy of Morally Stigmatizing Poor Single Black Moms” for the book Welfare Policy: (Feminist Critiques).

The Rev. Thomas J. Massaro is dean of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. He wrote the book Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform. He also co-wrote the article “Compassion in Action: A Letter to President Bush on Social Policy” for the journal America (2001).

Read a statement from the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch saying the budget worried Ryan’s former parish priest.