“Perhaps more than any other academic in the United States, Professor Wilson has pioneered innovative approaches to melding protections for the LGBT community with protections for persons of faith in a single law. I have witnessed firsthand Professor Wilson’s capacity for building bridges and finding zones of common interest and common ground. Utah’s legislature benefited greatly from her efforts when we enacted our landmark 2015 Religious Liberty/ LGBT laws. Since that time, I have witnessed her efforts to assist other state lawmakers across the nation through the Fairness for All Initiative she founded at the University of Illinois with private philanthropic support. Together with various state legislative partners, she has hosted legislative Fairness for All Summits in statehouses across the country—from Alaska to Pennsylvania—to assist other states to enact nuanced laws that facilitates an environment where all citizens can flourish.”

“I’ve had the privilege of hosting Professor Wilson during one of her early dialogues in Idaho about her ideas for building support for much needed LGBT rights and designing accommodations for religion. In the space of three years, Professor Wilson has made more trips to Idaho and we have worked together on the thorny problem of faith healing. I know first-hand that Professor Wilson has the regard of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and that she is laying important groundwork, not only in Idaho, but elsewhere.”

“We came razor close to tackling an issue pressing to Ohioans, how to protect religious freedom while treating all with dignity. In that process, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Professor Wilson, Senator Adams and their team made all the difference in crafting a bill far more sophisticated than any of the bill sponsors might have envisioned at the beginning. Robin’s creative solution to public accommodations brought our group back to the table when I finally realized it would be fatal to consider any approach that did not include public accommodations. For more than a month, I spent nearly as much time with Robin as I did with my own family.

The key, I believe, was bringing legislators and stakeholders from all communities together in summits and speaking to groups of religious stakeholders and LGBT advocates on countless conference calls. Ultimately, time proved too short to get this across the finish line. The need has only become more pressing with time, as Ohioans are deeply committed to treating everyone with respect and dignity.”

“Working with the Fairness for All team has been a pleasure. In particular, I’ve been able to join in by hosting dialogues with university students and their communities about the state of the nation concerning religious freedom and LGBTQ nondiscrimination. This work, which Fairness for All advances in a number of ways, is the sort of on-the-ground approach that will ultimately bring us all together.”

“We created Family Policy Resource to be a trusted authority for Utahns on policies concerning Life, Family, and Religious Freedom. Our earliest work with Professor Wilson was during the 2015 Utah Legislative Session, where together we supported landmark legislation sponsored by Senator Stuart Adams.

This legislation guarantees specific religious freedom protections to individuals, small businesses, religious schools and charities, and churches. We testified in legislative committee meetings, spoke with individual legislators, worked with other like-minded organizations, talked to media representatives, sent educational emails to our mailing list, and stood in the bill-signing photo. We believe this important legislation has given Utah the strongest, most robust religious protections in the nation.

One of the greatest benefits to come from this legislation has been increased respect for differing viewpoints within our culture. We encourage other states to consider following this proven model of how to protect religious freedom in our pluralistic society.”

“Robin is like a one-woman public policy think tank for the cause of religious freedom for people of all faiths. Her scholarship and policy ideas are creative and indispensable, she has a unique ability to talk sense to religious freedom advocates and those with more limited definitions of religious liberty, and she does all of this with kindness, humility, and superhuman energy that can only be explained by prodigious caffeine consumption.”

“Like many other academics, I am impressed with the brilliance of the Fairness for All concept and with Professor Wilson’s and Senator Adams’ boundless energy on behalf of all people. Indeed, I have interviewed numerous stakeholders all across the political spectrum for my new book—all have come away with deep respect for Professor Wilson, Senator Adams, and their commitment to rolling up their sleeves and working alongside state lawmakers to find a template for a more just society. Led by Professor Wilson, the Fairness for All Initiative has amazing “convening power,” pulling together reasonable voices, inside and outside the academy, to focus on hard questions that are crucial to realizing a new chapter in American pluralism.”

“We have to have the civic will to resolve [conflicts between the faith and LGBT communities], and I don’t see enough of that right now. There are some people who are working hard to create a more civil dialogue on that conflict. Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson and Sen. Stuart Adams in Utah are working on what they call the Fairness for All campaign. That’s a good example of trying to help state legislatures do what they did in Utah to work out the compromise legislation. But, unfortunately, too many people on different sides of this issue, in my view, still have a zero-sum game approach to these fights: ‘We’re going to win it all.’ I tell my friends: We’re all a religious minority, a sexual minority, somewhere in the country and we need as Americans across our differences to learn how to protect the rights of others.”

“In the months leading up to the Utah Compromise, and in the years since, Robin has worked harder and done more on behalf of religious liberty than any other law professor in the history of the country. I have no idea how a full-time academic has managed to spend so much hands-on time with legislators around the country; I know that I could not have done it. Robin has worked tirelessly for productive compromises that protect the rights of all Americans. With both sides deeply resistant to compromise, the results have sometimes been disappointing. But we couldn’t know that until Robin and key legislators tried. And we have the great successes in Utah as a model for the future. We know there will not be gay-rights laws in red states or Congress without religious exceptions, and Robin has pointed the path to both.”

“In the struggle between LGBT rights and religious freedom, the shared space is to be found in a robust pluralism that ensures fairness – fairness for all. To a person who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, fairness for all includes protection from being denied a livelihood, a place to live, or basic services just because of who they are. To the religious adherent, fairness for all means the free exercise of religion, including the right to freely associate with fellow believers. That right cannot be absolute everywhere, to be sure, but there are many important spheres where it must be vigorously protected or religious freedom becomes meaningless. The successful legislation and wise jurisprudence happens in the shared space of Fairness for All.”

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“If we accept that the culture wars tear at the strained threads of American comity and civility that bind us together – and that litigation (which some advocates in good faith feel is indispensable) may, in the short run, exacerbate those strains – we have the opportunity to find societal and legislative paths towards compromise where it is possible  – and the space and conditions to lift up common ground where compromise may not yet be possible. The time to explore such paths is before us now. The efforts Senator Adams, Professor Wilson, and their team are making across the country are crucial to breaking through our present impasse.”

“Professor Wilson has served as the organizer and orchestrator of serious discussions about these topics among legal scholars. She has also been a major bridge builder among academics, advocates, policy makers, and politicians, trying to build reconciliation, state by state, legal issue by legal issue.  The book she has co-edited, Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights, and the Prospects for Common Ground, is only one part of the fruits of her ample and energetic labors on behalf of a true reconciliation effort.”

“The ability to work with people who are different from us has always been important to human flourishing. But today’s political climate makes that need even more urgent—even as it constantly reinforces our pre-existing assumptions and makes it more difficult to hear out opposing viewpoints with open ears and an open heart. The Fairness for All Initiative helps break that impasse.”