By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Almost ready to start applying their new knowledge to battle moral challenges around the globe, law-school students at a dinner here were reminded that the Soviet Union once was regarded as an invincible adversary, but it finally collapsed in relatively short order.
The Christian law students from 11 countries, interns in this year’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, had just spent nearly two weeks of intense preparation before leaving Phoenix for summer assignments where they’d be facing today’s forces of secularism and coercion that are on the march to defeat historic morality.
One of the interns at the lectern recalled at the June 18 dinner that the Soviet Union itself was thought to be unbeatable. However, after coming into formation early in the 20th century, this muscular international communist dictatorship surprisingly fell apart before the century ended.
The intern expressed hope that “we’ll eventually prevail” similarly against the current attacks on innocent life, religious freedom, and marriage.
A ministry of the activist Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Blackstone program began in Phoenix in 2000 with 24 U.S. interns who served for the summer only at U.S. locations. Each year Blackstone trains a new group of students.
After the international character of the fight against traditional morality became apparent, Blackstone accepted its first two interns from overseas in 2007 and sent eight of that year’s participants outside the U.S.
The interns serve at public-interest law firms, think tanks, public-policy organizations, and judicial offices to provide assistance, hone their expertise and prepare to network as they advance their careers. They return to Arizona for career guidance and debriefing before their next year of law school begins.
In 2015, 26 of Blackstone’s 158 interns are from other countries. The interns departed their training in Phoenix on June 19 to serve in 17 countries including the U.S.
They are 103 males and 55 females from 62 leading law schools, 10 of the schools outside the U.S.
Jeffery Ventrella, Ph.D., ADF senior counsel and senior vice president for student training and development, told The Wanderer that while here, the interns received instruction from experts in “theology, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, law, natural law, constitutionalism, federalism, marriage contra [same-sex marriage], religious exercise contra mere ‘worship,’ and life contra commodization.”
Forty-four of the interns are Roman Catholic and had access to an onsite daily Mass during the training. The other interns also had regular religious observance.
“The interns understand, experience, and apply the mark of being a Jesus follower: love of God and man,” Ventrella said, with their Christian faith “best expressed in the great ecumenical creeds and confessions of the Church.”
In addition to U.S. interns, participants this year come from Argentina, Mexico, Sweden, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, the UK, Chile, Canada, and Guatemala, Ventrella said. Besides the U.S., they’re assigned to work in Belgium, Austria, South Africa, India, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Argentina, Mexico, Sweden, Peru, Brazil, the UK, Chile, Canada, and Guatemala.
The Wanderer attended the interns’ afternoon training of June 18.
Sofia Martinez, herself a Blackstone participant in 2010, works in the Mexico City office of ADF International and spoke on “International Institutions and the Threat of Transnationalism.”
She told the audience how “soft law” is developed through different bodies’ resolutions, recommendations, protocols, treaties, and other instruments that aren’t binding but can serve as “a framework” to build on for promoting a cause like permissive abortion.
The cause may not have succeeded in a nation, Martinez said, but these documents can “undermine national law” and eventually position the cause “as the new law.”
The battle to undermine “life, family, and religious freedom” started to be encountered in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, she said.
The United Nations is “an enormous organization” with so many committees, councils, and other bodies that the structure is very complicated, she said. Committees on topics like violence against women, discrimination against women, and the rights of the child can be useful for shoehorning in an agenda.
“Sexual and reproductive rights” are said to bring everyone “a happy and fulfilling life,” she said, and are advanced as part of “human rights.”
Although something like an alleged right to abortion isn’t even mentioned in documents, she said, that can be the meaning behind the words.
“No one likes to be painted as a country that violates human rights,” she said.
Even though an original treaty may not even have contemplated a current situation, that doesn’t stop activists on the other side from trying to use it to their advantage, she said.
Giving an example of what amounted to pro-abortion trickery, Martinez told of abortion advocates having a South American woman sign a paper requesting an abortion for her healthy ten-year-old daughter, even though the woman couldn’t read Spanish and spoke only an indigenous language.
This was part of their campaign to widen access to abortion there, Martinez said.
“Our presence needs to grow, our voices need to be heard to speak up,” she said.
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