Cathy Cleaver Ruse is Senior Fellow, Legal Studies at the Family Research Council. Her professional experience spans the fields of communication, public policy and law. She has appeared on PBS’s Firing Line and CNN’s Crossfire. She has published scholarly legal articles on constitutional issues and has filed “friend of the court” briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court. She […]

Mark E. Chopko is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law and an expert on church-state relations. He has been a member of the Board of Scholars of the DePaul Law School’s Center for Church-State Studies, the American Corporate Counsel Association and the National Council of Churches Religious Liberty Committee. He is the author […]

Melissa Rogers is a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies for Brookings, where she specializes in the First Amendment’s religion clauses and religion and faith-related political issues. She previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Barry Lynn is executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a lobbying group based in Washington, D.C.

Read a Dec. 21, 2000, Associated Press story posted by the Cincinnati Enquirer about a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Christmas can continue to be a legal holiday, as it has been since 1870, because it has a secular purpose.

Religioustolerance.com offers a snapshot of the court decisions involving Good Friday holidays.

Robert P. George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. He has written on natural law, marriage and family life, religious freedom, bioethics and public morality. Additionally, he’s served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School and was a vocal advocate of  Pope John Paul II’s views on women, abortion, sexuality and related issues. In 2004 the pope appointed her as head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, at that time the highest Vatican post ever held […]

Helen M. Alvaré is a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia. Alvaré chaired the commission investigating clerical abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and was an adviser to Pope Benedict XVI’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, as well as an ABC News consultant. Her scholarship regularly addresses current controversies about marriage, parenting and the […]