My clients are two African-American, Christian women who happen to work for the City of Oakland. They started the Good News Employee Association to talk about their views on the "natural family, marriage and family values." They formed Good News at the same time that the Gay and Lesbian Employees Association was disseminating its own views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage to all City employees, with the approval of the City.?

My clients have strong religious views about homosexuality and same sex marriage. However, they did not attack or criticize their Gay and Lesbian co-workers for what they had to say, even though it opposed their religious values. They did not attack or criticize their employer for allowing the advocacy of the gay position in the workplace. No, they met the challenge to their values with tolerance. They said, in essence, "This is a free country. Everyone has a right to believe what they choose and say what they believe. And we also have a right to say what we believe."

So Regina Rederford and Robin Christy sat down and tried to think how to advocate their beliefs in the most positive possible terms, to add in a constructive way to the diversity of their workplace. They chose the words "natural family, marriage and family values" as a phrase that captures the heart of their beliefs without proselytizing or putting others down. They asked permission to circulate an invitation containing these terms to their co-workers using the same city-wide e-mail system that the Gay and Lesbian group had used but were denied. They then put the phrase on a flyer announcing the start of the Good News group and posted it on the employee bulletin board -- alongside flyers with every sort of message from anti-war slogans to ads for puppies.

Unsurprisingly, the bulletin eventually led to a complaint by a lesbian employee, who, along with her supervisors, found the flier homophobic. Why, asked the lawyers, when it made "absolutely no mention of homosexuality"? The plaintiffs decided that their First Amendment rights had been violated, and that their case directly bore upon "the issue of whether Christians have a right to use neutral language in the workplace to talk about same-sex marriage and other issues at the forefront of the national debate." Upping the ante on what's at stake here, Lively and his colleague, Richard Ackerman claim that:

a decision against the employees could silence debate about homosexuality and related issues in the entire Western United States since the Ninth Circuit controls a large region of the United States and its rulings are binding on millions of employees whose speech is subject to punishment by employers who promote agendas that defy Judeo-Christian values.

...Attorney Richard Ackerman says, "This case has the potential to make a horrible judicial edict that suggests that the only thoughts and words allowed in a public workplace are those that support the homosexual agenda. The City of Oakland has interpreted this district court's ruling to mean that Christianity has no place in our society and should be subject to punishment. I want to believe that our Supreme Court will ultimately decide this case on the values and instructions set forth in motion by the nation's Founders.

A press release issued by Christian Newswire strives to reinforce the notion of reverse discrimination at work here: "U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the case in February 2005, ruling the two women did not have their First Amendment rights violated and that federal anti-discrimination protections afforded to gender, race, and religion did not apply to the women plaintiffs."

It's probably not too cynical to assume that Ackerman's Supreme Court aspirations are helped along by the handpicked fortuitous ethnicity of his clients. The plaintiffs - as noted in the first two paragraphs of all sympathetic conservative press accounts of the case, in the press release, and in the fourth line of their lawyers' opening statements - are black. And their views toward gays and lesbians, as their lawyers folksily put it, "are best represented in the old saying `love the sinner, hate the sin.'" Presumably, the women's' race is meant to mitigate the appearance of intolerance or bigotry that is normally associated with gay-baiting bulletins such as their covert appeal to "defend workplace intergrity" through "respect for the natural family," or that of the Hewlett-Packard employee fired for a similarly-minded, but more explicitly hostile display in 2001. (The employee in this case using the not-so-subtle tact of bedecking his cubicle with quotes from Leviticus: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.")

The attorneys in the case, working pro-bono and with the support of the Pro-Family Law Center and Abiding Truth Ministries -- a "biblical marriage" outfit that fights gay marriage via funding cases such as this, and through training fellow culture warriors for the good fight, and which, incidentally, is headed up by Lively -- describe their own record like this:

The firm's public interest and constitutional law efforts are nationwide and retention of these cases are based on the foreseeable and unique cultural impact of each case.  We have aggressively defended the Pledge of Allegiance, the First Amendment, traditional marriage, border security, patient rights, health care provider rights, and other important causes affecting the future of California and our nation.

Going beyond complicated issues of the boundaries of expression of religion in the workplace - an issue that's occupied a contested piece of legislation, the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, for nearly a decade, as it unsteadily attempts to walk the line between protecting benign expressions of faith such as clothing and grooming choices, and religious allowances that pose undue burdens on third parties, such as exemptions for certain employees to key aspects of their jobs on religious or moral grounds - the unique cultural impact of this case may be in the choice of language itself: "the natural family."

For the past several years, "the natural family" has increasingly been the term of choice for religious right groups seeking to differentiate heterosexual, nuclear, patriarchal families. It's their term of "positive identification": a more cultured way to oppose Heather's two mommies than to condemn "the homosexual lifestyle" with pulpit-slamming vitriol. In fact, just as in Rederford and Christy's "Good News" bulletin, homosexuality isn't really mentioned at all.

"The Natural Family Manifesto," co-written by Allan Carlson of the Howard Center, and Paul Mero of the conservative Utah think-tank, the Sutherland Institute, is perhaps the most comprehensive elucidation of the "natural family": a manifesto modeled on Marx's that strives to set the positive, affirmative vision for a movement that has so long defined itself in opposition to other sets of society, be they gays, feminists, secularists, or liberals. First and foremost, it sets down the family, as opposed to the individual, as the fundamental unit of society. Slightly wonky words that signify little - who wants to be the selfish bastard in the room glorifying themselves at the expense of the communal family - but which lay the groundwork for the demolition of rights based on individual, rather than communal, good, and subjugate any desires for personal fulfillment to the monolithic good of the many. More specifically, the manifesto defines marriage as heterosexual, and procreative; affirms traditional gender roles as part of the separate-but-equal "created order"; calls for families to open themselves to a "full quiver" of children; and for families to take up their duty to populate the earth with prolific families. Like the phrase "natural family" itself, specific proposals within the manifesto, such as its call for a return to a "family wage," sound progressive and worker-friendly, but in fact give cover to a return to gender-determined pay scales, wherein men with families are given hiring preference and larger salaries, based on 1930s notions of the man as provider.

In fact, when The Natural Family Manifesto was released in 2005, the Sutherland Institute promoted it to 232 different communities in the state of Utah, urging them to adopt "natural family" resolutions for the guidance of their communities. The only city that took them up on the challenge, the 3,600-person town of Kanab, sparked a miniature culture-war within city limits. The progressive members of the town and surrounding communities weren't oblivious to the thinly coded homophobia in the Manifesto-inspired resolution, and reacted with protests and letters to the editor. (A new film directed and produced by two Utah progressives, Frank Feldman and Troy Williams, covers the controversy and backlash from an inside perspective.)

What may be more significant about California's current "natural family" case is less questions about whether the flier should have been allowed to be posted in a workplace, than the evolution of the phrase the flier employed, from think-tank construction to culture-war ammunition. It's a natural evolution - being martyred as "hate speech" and going to court was likely what the phrase was designed to do: to lure GLBT-defenders into attacking an Apple-Pie-American idea like the natural family. In a way, the phrase could become what the word "tolerance" has long been to the right, a neutral-sounding stand-in for a controversial idea, the real significance of which won't be determined in a court or corporate boardroom, but through repetition in the press.