Up to $2 million of Cooperative Program funds will be paid by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee to cover legal fees of its newly retained law firm that supports the Nashville Pride festival, the LGBTQ Bar, and is praised by the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s largest LGBTQ organizations.

Bradley Legal was highlighted in Human Rights Campaign’s material, and the firm has touted the link in several releases.

“Bradley is pleased to announce that the firm scored a 90 out of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2022 Corporate Equality Index (CEI), the nation’s foremost benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality,” the law firm reported on its website. “I am pleased to see the firm’s hard work recognized once again in the Corporate Equality Index,” said Bradley Legal’s Chairman of the Board and Managing Partner Jonathan M. Skeeters.

Bradley apparently meets all the criteria for HRC’s “Corporate Social Responsibility,” which would require written guidelines that prohibit the firm’s “philanthropic support” of non-religious organizations that draw distinctions based on traditional sexual morality.

The law firm’s diversity material shows that it sponsored the 2021 Nashville Pride Festival and Parade, an annual event celebrating the LGBTQ community. Bradley Legal also supported the Human Rights Campaign Nashville Equality Dinner. The Human Rights Campaign is a major political player in the battle over proposed legislation like the Equality Act at the federal level and the Missouri Non-Discrimination Act (MONA). Both threaten the First Amendment rights of Southern Baptists.

Bradley Legal also supports Susan G. Komen, an organization that fights breast cancer, which got into hot water in 2012 when it was learned that Komen was providing funds to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of abortions. Bradley attorneys also spoke at a 2017 Chinese Overseas Investment Legal Forum in Shanghai, despite a massive expansion that year of genocide and mass detention of Uyghurs by the communist Chinese government.

The SBC Executive Committee approved up to $2 million in CP reserves to cover its own legal fees associated with the ongoing sexual abuse investigation during a Feb. 22 plenary session. This is in addition to the $2 million fee for Guidepost Solutions, also from the EC’s reserves. Tapping reserves for the charges comports with a mandate of messengers from the 2021 SBC annual meeting that Cooperative Program funds cover the costs of the investigation, said Archie Mason, chair of the Committee on Convention Finances and Stewardship Development.

“If you look at the allocation of CP funds, what we have in reserves is $12.2 million,” Mason said. “What that is, is money we didn’t spend, that was allocated to us out of our 2.9 (percent) allocation (of CP) that has built up in reserve. So that’s been investment income.” The “investment income” was built from money given by SBC churches through the Cooperative Program.

The SBC Executive Committee has now named Bradley as “interim legal counsel,” according to reporting by Baptist Press. This means Alabama-based Bradley Legal is stepping into the shoes of longtime Convention attorneys Jim Guenther and Jaime Jordan of Nashville.

Gene Besen, a lawyer in Bradley’s Texas office, appeared at the Feb. 22 meeting in Nashville. Last year, Guenther said his firm had no choice but to “withdraw … from [its] role as general counsel to the Southern Baptist Convention and the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Guenther’s withdrawal came about a week after EC members voted to waive attorney-client privilege over 21 years of documents and emails in the independent, third-party investigation into allegations of mishandling of sexual abuse claims by the SBC EC staff and trustees. That decision, Guenther said, “fundamentally changed the understanding that has always existed regarding communications between our firm and the Executive Committee or the Convention.” Guenther had served the SBC since 1966.

BP reports that Bradley had produced nearly 4 terabytes of data to the investigators, collected from the EC files or from Guenther, Jordan & Price, PC.

The selection and retainer of the new law firm was before Willie McLaurin was named interim president. Executive Committee Chairman Rolland Slade said the EC officers made the decision to retain Bradley based on a recommendation from former SBC President and Chief Executive Officer Ronnie Floyd and that Bradley had served as legal counsel for Lifeway for a number of years.

“I know with a large firm like Bradley, that they believe in inclusion and diversity,” Slade said, adding they have 600 attorneys and that he is sure not all of them hold the same views. He said the firm also represents conservative organizations like the National Rifle Association. He said one of the attorneys the EC works with is Scarlett Nokes, a member of a Southern Baptist church in the Nashville area.

— Don Hinkle is editor of the Missouri Baptist Convention’s Pathway newsjournal.