Ruth Neely will go down in history as one of Wyoming’s legendary champions of free speech. While First Amendment principles have returned to the limelight, you should remember her heroic stand.
Ruth came to Wyoming for an education and stayed for a lifetime. As a student at UW, she met a man who was drawn to God by Ruth’s life. He asked for her hand in marriage. Together they built a home and a family in the shadow of the Wind River Range.
That family became an anchor for the Pinedale community. Ruth’s quiet wisdom continued to draw the respect of her fellow citizens. They made her Pinedale’s town judge in 1994. They kept her there for a quarter-century.
There, she came to the attention of other judges. In time, Ninth Judicial Circuit Judge Rick Hawes asked her to assist him as magistrate for Sublette County. Again, her quiet competence drew the respect of her peers.
Meanwhile, a worldwide assault on the First Amendment was darkening the horizon. An unelected cadre of LGB activists (TQIA2+ had not yet been added) crafted the Yogyakarta Principles as a road map for rewriting marriage and family laws in every country.
By 2012, the Wyoming Bar Association quietly imported that radical agenda into its Wyoming Code for Judicial Conduct. Central to that agenda was the stifling of any speech that objected to their project. So-called “anti-discrimination laws” were the weapon of choice.
America prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin in 1964, after breaking a 75-day filibuster that was organized by Senators Richard Russell (D-GA), Strom Thurmond (D-SC), Robert Byrd (D-WV), William Fulbright (D-AR) and Sam Ervin (D-NC).
But in 2006, the Yogyakarta activists planned to turn that law against itself. Co-opting civil rights language, they would discriminate against anyone who would not comply with their topsy-turvy re-definitions of marriage, husband, wife, mother, and father.
Ruth Neely was among the first Wyomingites to find herself in the globalists’ cross hairs. On a December Friday in 2014, when a reporter for the Pinedale Roundup (on a visa from the UK) pressured her to change her lifelong understanding of marriage as husband and wife, she didn’t even blink.
Ruth understood that she was a steward of the laws passed by Wyoming citizens. There was simply no legitimate way to contort the statutory language of “husband and wife” (20-1-106(b). And, as an officer of state laws, she could not unilaterally rewrite them.
As a human being, she also understood that she had both the duty to speak the truth and the duty to honor God’s sacred institution.
As a citizen of the United States, she expected her government to uphold her corresponding rights to Free Speech and to the Free Exercise of Religion.
Finally, as a Wyomingite, she expected that the state’s government would stand in the breach to protect her “liberty of conscience” without discrimination or preference, as promised in Wyoming’s Constitution (Art. 1; Sec. 18).
Sadly, none of her rightful expectations were met. The legislature that wrote the law never stood up to defend it. The judicial branch that made her a magistrate kept telling her to wait for guidance that never came. The governor’s attorney general declined to defend Wyoming law in court. And the federal courts responsible for protecting her First Amendment rights declined to hear her pleas.
Perhaps worst of all, some of her fellow Wyomingites viciously attacked her person. Kerry Drake, a widely-read columnist, compared this soft-spoken woman, who was a pillar of her church and a pillar of her community, to “a member of a white supremacist group and writes inflammatory articles for its racist website.”
If you are concerned about the inflammatory language that led to violence, remember Ruth Neely. Egged on by state and national organizations, Ruth was harassed at home, at work, in the national press and most appallingly, by vicious lawfare waged by the Wyoming Bar. She has been barred from helping anyone exchange vows since 2014.
Thursday night in Colorado Springs, she shared with a couple hundred of us what that was like. In her plaintive yet unwavering voice, she admitted: “I tell you what. There is no joy in being labeled bigoted, racist, hateful, [and] homophobic.” The pain was obvious.
But Ruth Neely willingly took those arrows because she knew that one small candle can light up a dark room. One quiet word of truth can expose a thousand shouted lies. One soldier, standing firm, can turn the course of an entire war.
When the principles that built America are restored to their rightful place, historians will look back on the Ruth Neelys of our generation as those who stood faithfully while others fled.
And that’s what the First Amendment is about. The freedom to speak is not about newspapers. It is not about the entertainment industry. It is not about pornography. It is about your duty to say what you believe to be true and right and good.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
