The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that a religious nonprofit may challenge a state subpoena for donor information in federal court when the demand threatens its First Amendment rights.
In First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport, New Jersey’s attorney general Michael Platkin accused First Choice, a Christian resource center for women with unplanned pregnancies, of “seeking to prevent people from accessing reproductive health care by providing false or misleading abortion information,” according to the ruling.
Platkin hoped to contact donors to determine if they had “been misled” into thinking First Choice “provides abortions.” He served a subpoena demanding that the group produce “documents reflecting the names, phone numbers, addresses and places of employment of all individuals who had made donations,” according to the ruling.
First Choice filed a suit in federal district court, arguing that revealing the names of anonymous donors would discourage them from associating with the group.
In the ruling, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch (there are no concurring opinions and no dissents from other justices in the document), the court held that the subpoena seeking information about donors would cause injury to the group.
“An official demand for private donor information is enough to discourage reasonable individuals from associating with a group and to discourage groups from expressing dissident views,” he wrote.
William Haun, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of First Choice, called the decision “a triumph for every faith-based ministry in America.”
“The court made crystal clear that our First Amendment freedoms, including religious freedom, are ‘necessarily’ associative, and that keeps the federal courthouse doors open for religious groups to protect their governance from intrusive state bureaucrats,” he said.
