Lee Boothby, Adventist Trailblazer in Defending Sabbath rights, Dies at age 81

Story by Andrew McChesney/ Adventist Review via Adventist News Network

Lee Boothby, right, shaking hands with an unidentified man in 1967 at his alma mater Andrews University, where he served as a member of the board of trustees. [photo courtesy Center for Adventist Research Image Database

Lee Boothby, one of the first Adventist lawyers and a trailblazer in defending Sabbath rights, has died at the age of 81.

Boothby died on the morning of November 4 in an assisted living facility near his family home in Berrien Springs, Michigan, United States, family and friends say.

He moved to Michigan after suffering a stroke in 2013 in Washington, D.C. where he worked most of his career and maintained a law office until his illness.

Boothby championed the workplace rights of Adventists and other believers in the 1960s and ’70s, fleshing out the legal definition of religious accommodation in the workplace. The issue took the forefront after U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

“On the national level, if there was anyone who developed the concept of religious accommodation in the workplace, it was Lee Boothby,” says a close friend, Robert Nixon, who began working with Boothby as a young lawyer in 1974 and argued with him before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“He was relentless on just what employers must do,” said Nixon, who retired as the General Conference's general counsel in 2005.

Boothby began taking on cases of religious accommodation in the workplace before the General Conference, the administrative body of the Adventist world church, appointed an associate general counsel to assist in religious liberty issues. Boothby briefly held that position at the General Conference.

“Lee’s contribution to the church and to litigation was early, at a time when the Adventist Church did not have a lot of lawyers in house and was still putting together its religious liberty team,” says Todd McFarland, who oversees religious liberty cases as associate general counsel at the General Conference. “He was a leader.”

He added: “The Church and people of all faiths owe a debt to Lee Boothby for his contribution to religious liberty over the decades.”

Boothby was as a major proponent of the U.S. First Amendment, which establishes a wall of separation between church and state. No believer was off-limits, and in addition to many Adventists his clients included Christian Scientists, Scientologists, and Hare Krishnas.

In the 1990s, Boothby took his fight to the former Soviet bloc, visiting many countries of Eastern Europe to promote the concept of religious liberty under their new constitutions.

Orva Lee Boothby was born on March 17, 1933, in Bakersfield, California. He was named after a beloved pastor, Orva Lee Ice, but he chose to drop “Orva” when he enrolled in law school at Wayne State University in Detroit.

For a time he lived in the shadow of his father, Robert Loren Boothby, a renowned Adventist evangelist who baptized hundreds of people.

“When I was a younger person, it seemed like every person I met was baptized by my grandfather,” says Boothby’s elder daughter, Robin Rene Allen.

But Boothby, who attended Andrews University, had a drive and a determination that caught people’s attention soon after he finished law school in 1957, friends said. Before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, he had already made a name for himself as a leading litigator in cases involving individual rights of conscience and religious opposition to membership in labor unions.

“Lee was the first and for a long time the only and the most influential church-state litigator the Adventist Church has ever produced,” says long-time friend Mitchell Tyner, who retired as associate general counsel of the General Conference in 2006.

“He was a bulldog at it,” Tyner said. “For many of us who came along decades later, he was the image by which we measured our contributions.”

He said Boothby was one of the first lawyers to emerge from the Adventist Church.

Boothby led or worked as general counsel for several organizations, including Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the International Commission of Freedom of Conscience and the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief.

He worried that U.S. politicians were pulling bricks out of the church-state wall to create a new religion of compromise that offended no one.

"What you are tending to see is a new secular state religion," Boothby told Time Magazine in a 2001 cover story on church-state relations. "It's not really religion."

Boothby wasn’t about to let that happen, and he pursued cases in many top courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, the Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Federal Circuits, and Tax Court, among others.

Tyner described Boothby as “a Lone Ranger type and good at it.”

“It was impossible for him to retire,” he sad. “He kept going until he almost fell apart on the job.”

His daughter, Robin Allen, said her father preferred to vacation in warm places like Hawaii or Jamaica, but his work always took priority.

“My dad was an extreme workaholic, and sometimes our vacation would get cut short,” Allen said. “I remember him looking around everywhere for a phone to make a call.”

Even after the stroke, Boothby remained concerned about his clients. They visited him in the hospital in Washington, where he stayed for several months before moving to Michigan.

“He wasn’t just their attorney, he also was their friend,” Allen said.

She said her father had a very personal relationship with God and he never pushed his beliefs on others.

“I believe this was due to his strong conviction that religion is a personal decision, and each individual should be allowed to choose to worship as they wish,” she said.

This story original appeared on Adventist News Network's Website.