Mississippi-based American Family Association** filed suit last Friday in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The non-profit ministry is asking the court to review FCC 24-18, the official FCC order dated February 22 that reauthorized the data collection.
The employee data is collected on Form 395-B, which has not been seen for 20 years after it was successfully challenged in the courts.
National Religious Broadcasters, or NRB, is a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Troy Miller, NRB’s president and CEO, said in a statement many NRB members would be required to comply with the order, which he called “arbitrary and capricious,” so NRB is “standing up” on their behalf.
“Form 395-B was suspended for 20 years for good reason and revived on highly questionable grounds,” Miller said. “Today we are challenging this unnecessary and unlawful action by filing our petition for review.”
NRB member American Family Radio, a ministry of AFA, oversees 168 radio stations spread across 30 states.
Abraham Hamilton III, AFA’s general counsel, says the revived policy was alarming to the ministry in light of the Biden administration’s obsession with "gender identity" in Title IX federal law.
“The ultimate objective of the legislation,” Hamilton says, referring to the February order, “is for the Biden administration to compel AFR to subscribe to and to capitulate to its radical identity agenda and the sexual deviancy social political agenda.”
The decision to reinstate Form 395-B came after a 3-2 vote by the commission in February, according to an article by radioink.com, a radio-industry trade publication.
The three Democrats on the five-member commission pushed for the data to analyze workforce diversity, the article said. Among several objections, the two Republicans on the commission warned the data, which is public, could be used to demand race-based hiring practices. That would be unconstitutional and violate the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
According to Hamilton, AFA sees a First Amendment problem with the required data.
“We object to it on constitutional, First Amendment grounds,” he advises, “as well as religious freedom grounds off our free exercise of religious freedom.”
**Editor's Note: The American Family Association is the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates AFN.net.
