Expert Witness
Activist Lawyer Jan LaRue Is Carrying A Banner for Sam Alito in a Battle That's as Personal as It Is Political

By Marcia Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 9, 2006

Jan LaRue is not your usual Washington political commando or Ivy League-trained insider. She is not your power-suit-wearing, dinner-party-schmoozing, headline-grabbing Beltway operator.

What she is, though, is a street fighter -- a Christian one, armed with a law degree. Lately, LaRue has been battling over the future of the Supreme Court. That war returns to prime time today with the start of the Senate confirmation hearings for Samuel A. Alito.

In conservative circles, LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, is known for her legal acumen, assertion of principles over politics, and debating style, which has been described as fierce, tough and even ruthless. LaRue likes to say she believes in being direct without being brutal.

CWA is a big supporter of Alito, though it rejected his predecessor, Harriet Miers. Remember her? CWA had incredible timing on that one, announcing its opposition to Miers the day before she quit, helping to hand President Bush a resounding defeat from his political base. LaRue was in the thick of all that.

But LaRue, who turns 67 tomorrow, took the long road to Washington, arriving by way of darkness and light. Her life story is a dramatic one that includes molestation, self-described heavy drinking and promiscuity, and dropping out of high school. And, she will tell you with great regret, she had an illegal abortion. She eventually ended up a divorcee and a single mom before she found another man to love and a God to save her.

She's an evangelical Christian now, a lawyer who has built a career as a fierce opponent of pornography. That work brought her to this town and led her into the ranks of those trying to push the court decidedly to the right.

"I think history put her in a unique role," says Manuel Miranda, a conservative judicial activist and Wall Street Journal columnist, of LaRue and the Miers episode. "She's evangelical, she's a woman, she's well spoken and she's a lawyer, a very careful lawyer. . . . I think she's very influential."

* * *

Her desk could pass the white-glove test, easy. It's the kind of clean that inspires feelings of inadequacy. There are no papers out of place, no files scattered about. Not even a stray paper clip.

She has a gavel on her desk, front and center. She is a mother of two, a stepmother of three and a grandmother, so there is a picture of her kids and grandkids. There also is a picture of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And tucked under the see-through desk pad are three small pieces of paper -- a copy of the Bill of Rights, a copy of the Ten Commandments, and verses from the Bible. Among them, this one: "Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the LORD understand it fully" (Proverbs 28:5). There it is, in black and white, the intersection of LaRue's faith and her politics -- and her life.

Sitting at her desk, LaRue is fresh from a panel on Alito where she says, with a playful smirk, she would like to see the Supreme Court put Roe v. Wade through a paper shredder and then set it afire with a blowtorch.

That passion -- and blistering bluntness, which she often likes to deliver with a biting wit -- is what distinguishes her, say friends and admirers. "She is not one of those activists whose primary agenda is herself," says Thomas Jipping, who works for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and once worked with LaRue at CWA. "She is motivated by -- especially in the work she does on pornography -- the victims, those harmed by this. . . . There's lots of ways she could get all kinds of attention to herself and she doesn't do that. That's not Jan."

Culture Wars

LaRue has emerged as a key player in the culture wars. CWA bills itself as the country's largest public-policy women's group. It was founded by Beverly LaHaye in 1979. LaHaye and her husband, Tim, are evangelical powerhouses and best-selling authors. He is the co-author of the wildly successful "Left Behind" novel series.

CWA defines its mission as bringing "Biblical principles into all levels of public policy. . . . Through prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society," it aims to reverse "the decline in moral values in our nation."

It opposes abortion, pornography and gay marriage. CWA promotes prayer in school and supports teaching intelligent design. It describes itself as a staunch defender of religious freedom.

It was LaRue's opposition to pornography that first took her into the courts on cultural issues. She has become recognized as a legal expert on pornography law. But porn was just the gateway for LaRue, who, long before she arrived at CWA, decided that one of the frontlines in the cultural wars was the courts.

The Supreme Court, says LaRue, is the key to everything else. Which explains how a little girl from the Midwest who grew up embittered and embattled would find herself in the nation's capital speaking in favor of Chief Justice John Roberts, helping to send Miers limping back to her old job at the White House, and finding every opportunity to defend Alito.

As she said at a news conference last week, "One can hope for the right and just thing, but if the past is prologue and predictions are realized, then there will not be a unanimous vote" for Alito. "Partisan politicians will defer to the unreasonable demands of special-interest groups."

A Troubled Childhood

Few friends or family members can corroborate the tragic experiences in LaRue's youth. Her father and her stepfather are dead. Her mother died in August. But it is her story, her testimonial really, and she tells it in the most matter-of-fact tone.

She began sharing the tale of her early troubled years when she became a Christian, she says. And a few years back, she wrote about it briefly in an anti-pornography book she co-authored in 2002, "Protecting Your Child in an X-Rated World."

Her first years were spent with her parents and grandparents in Aurora, Ill., where she was born. Her father was a mechanic, her mother a homemaker. "Everything was great," she says.

But the marriage didn't last. The divorce, which occurred when LaRue was 7, was a turning point in her life, though even before then she was learning how dangerous the world could be.

In her book, which she wrote with fellow anti-pornography activist Frank York, she recounts being 4 or 5, and going to the movies with her parents. She was sitting next to her mother in the dark and nearly empty theater, she says, when a stranger sat down beside her. Her father was sitting on the other side of LaRue's mother.

The stranger, she says, kept touching her, putting his hands up her legs.

"I kept moving closer to my mother, almost in her lap. But she kept saying, 'Sit back, sit back.' "

She says she told her parents about the stranger after they'd left the theater. They were outraged, but there was nothing to be done. The guy was long gone.

The father of her babysitter also molested her when she was about 6, LaRue says.

"My babysitter took me to her home and her mother wasn't there, but her father was. She busied herself in another part of the house and her father grabbed me and pulled me up on his lap and started putting his hands where they didn't belong and I struggled and got away from him and ran outside and hid behind a tree," she says.

Her sitter found her hiding there later and took her home.

But it is the story that LaRue tells of what happened after her parents divorced that freezes the blood. Her mother remarried and the family moved to a rural area of Illinois -- Sugar Grove, just outside Aurora. On occasion her mother would leave her with a relative.

He "molested me repeatedly and violently for two years when I was 7 and 8," she says. "He actually threatened to kill me if I told anybody about it.

"He would force me down on the ground . . . he would put one hand on my throat and squeeze it after he put his fist in my face and threaten to kill me. I would call it digital rape.

"I did all I could to avoid being anywhere around him," she says, then falls silent.

"You read about what people do to little children and people don't want to think about it."

It was around the same time that her school principal also tried to hurt her, she says. He offered her a ride home one afternoon when she'd missed the school bus. Before she knew it, "he was reaching over putting his hands where they didn't belong," she says. She jumped out of the car just as he was turning into her gravel driveway, she says.

"Before he did it, he tried to intimidate me," LaRue says. "He said, 'You know you have been having trouble in class' and I didn't know what he was talking about. And he said, 'Ever since your baby sister was born you've had a problem.' . . . It was a typical kind of thing that an abusive adult would do to keep a child silenced."

And, as LaRue says, "it worked." She kept it all silent for decades -- and that took its toll. "I was an unhappy, angry little girl," LaRue says. "By 15, I had a serious drinking problem and became promiscuous." Even though she made good grades, she quit school at the end of first semester senior year. She was barely 17.

She moved to Moline, Ill., and got her first "real job," she says, as a secretary. And once again, she was in danger. It was 1956 and there weren't even words to discuss issues such as sexual harassment. Each month, LaRue says, the men in her office sent her out to buy the latest issue of Playboy magazine.

"It was my job to buy the magazine and to clear the phones, then mix the drinks," she says. "One of these times, one of the guys said, 'You know, you're prettier than any of the girls in this magazine. Why don't you let us take your picture?' And one of them just happened to have a camera. Even now sometimes I wonder where those pictures might be.

"When I look back on my teen years now, I see the profile of an abused child."

Marilyn Cirimele doesn't see her sister much, but they e-mail each other a lot, she says. LaRue is eight years older. The two have grown closer in adulthood and in their faith, Cirimele says, but she and LaRue didn't share similar childhoods.

She didn't learn about her sister's youthful travails until fairly recently, she says. "She wrote an article and she talked about having an abortion and that was the first I heard about it. . . . I didn't know anything actually until the last few years when she started her work.

"I guess it was just surprise. I was sad, of course -- you don't want that to happen to anybody, and then to have it happen to your sister. . . . She grew up a lot differently than I did."

Endings and Beginnings

"I can see myself on the table."

LaRue is in a doctor's office, though she can't see his face anymore, not the way she can see herself and that table. It has been nearly 50 years since she made the decision to end her first pregnancy. She is engaged to an older man, she is upset, she is embarrassed and worried that if the pregnancy continues, people will be able to count back and know the truth about her: She had sex before marriage. The Supreme Court would not rule on Roe v. Wade until 1973.

"Within 12 hours of me letting my desires be known, I had an appointment" in the office of a private doctor, LaRue says.

"I remember asking if there was anything there," she says. "The doctor said no, it's just a blob of tissue. But after the procedure, my soon-to-be mother-in-law said, 'You know, it was a boy.'

"My position of pro-life isn't just theoretical. I have two children and I should have three."

It wasn't long, though, before LaRue's life was about to change again. By the end of 1959, she was a divorcee and a single mother. She was working as a waitress when she met Gene LaRue.

"I tell people I put a cup of coffee in front of him and I've been doing it ever since," she says.

They married in 1960. He was a police officer and a single father of three whose first wife had walked out on him.

Jan LaRue became a homemaker with four kids. Then she and Gene had a son and there she was, the mother of five. But something was missing from their lives. They found what they were looking for in church, she and Gene LaRue say. They became Christians on Easter Sunday 1967.

"I always say it was a good day to be risen from the dead," she says.

She has never gotten therapy for the traumas of her youth, she says, because on that day all the anger she'd carried for so many years simply disappeared.

The LaRues went to work for Campus Crusade for Christ. They also did missionary work in several prisons, where LaRue says she found so many women who had also been sexually abused as children. She talked to them about her life and how she became a Christian, and she told the story of her youth -- all of it. Women, she says, came up to her to share their own stories of abuse.

It was her son, one day, who brought her a brochure about a special law program.

People had told her that she had the arguing skills of a lawyer and she would laugh it off, though truth be told, she had wanted to be a lawyer since she was a little girl. Now, here was her son, holding information about a program that allowed life experience to count toward a law degree.

"He said, 'Here, you can do this,' " Gene LaRue recalls.

The family, his wife says, "practically pushed me out the door." She was nearly 42 and still without a high school diploma. She applied and was accepted to the program run by the California State Bar and graduated in 1985 from Simon Greenleaf School of Law in Orange County. (The Christian law school is now known as Trinity International University School of Law.) She passed the bar on the first try.

In 1989 she went to work for the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, which defended the antiabortion group Operation Rescue. In another three years she would move to the conservative, anti-pornography group National Law Center for Children and Families, where her work against porn began in a serious way. She then became senior director of Legal Studies for the conservative Family Research Council before moving on to CWA. She and Gene describe the events that got her to law school and on her current path as "divine interventions."

"I went to law school with a goal," Jan LaRue says. "Not because I wanted a career, but because I wanted to make a difference."

The War on Porn

LaRue uses her personal story to help explain why she has focused on fighting pornography. Pornography is big business. Depending on whom you talk to, it rakes in anywhere from $8 billion to $12 billion a year. The Internet has placed it an anonymous click away.

Pornography, she and York argue, is a social poison that desensitizes its users -- most of whom supposedly are men -- and can destroy a man's ability to form healthy relationships with women. It is also addictive, they say, which in turn can lead to "deviant attitudes" and greater tolerance of deviant behavior. It can lead to the user acting out sexually, they say. Pornography, they say, is a tool of rapists and pedophiles, who have used it in particular to lure and seduce children. And children, they say, are what Americans should worry about.

"It means that your child is in danger of having his views of sexuality and relationships permanently warped . . . if he has access to pornographic materials. It also means that he may, like a growing number of kids, become a predator," they write.

But for however many studies they note in their book, there are studies to counter them.

"Research in this area is very politicized," says Neil Malamuth, a professor of communications and psychology at UCLA who for three decades has studied the social impact of pornography. Still, the findings do point in convincing directions, he says.

First, Malamuth reports, there is no empirical data to make a direct link of cause and effect when it comes to pornography and sexual aggression, be it rape or pedophilia. And the real effect of exposing children to pornography, according to many experts in the field, remains an unanswered question.

Malamuth notes, however, that if individuals who already have very high inclinations to aggression against women "are also heavy consumers of porn, particularly sexually violent porn, then they are even more likely to actually be sexually aggressive toward women."

LaRue's work against pornography has brought her up against those who see CWA's efforts and those of groups like it as censorship and a potential violation of the First Amendment.

"They have a right to condemn it. What they don't have a right to do is to tell other people what they can do," says Joan Bertin, head of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

No Question on Abortion

CWA supports Alito because it believes he'll vote to overturn Roe, says Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women.

"The Concerned Women for America weren't satisfied with being 98 percent sure with Harriet Miers" that she would be a vote for overturning Roe, Gandy says. "They had to be 100 percent sure. With Alito they are 100 percent sure."

LaRue demurs. "I would be disappointed if he indicated how he would vote," she says.

She says she knows that the majority of Americans support a woman's right to a legal abortion. Yet, she says, abortion is murder.

"We know when life begins," she says, brushing aside other arguments.

Besides, she says, her interest in shifting the court is larger than Roe, though overturning it would be the kind of justice that comes with overturning what she calls bad precedent, such as when Brown v. Board of Education rejected the court's earlier "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson .

"There is no denying that it's a major issue, but it's certainly not the only major issue," she says.

But LaRue is also considering moving on. Her husband faces several health challenges. LaRue already works at home two days a week. She says she is beginning to wonder what life would look like from the perspective of a retiree. She would continue working on the issues that matter to her, continue writing, too, but she says she and her husband have already been talking about where they might move.

Washington, she says, doesn't have a hold on her.