A certain perspective on The Acacia Group’s Lia Milousis comes from knowing she once “cheekily” informed God that since He was calling her to go to university, He would also have to help pay for it.

The Almighty didn’t exactly set up electronic funds transfers to her bank account when she started as an undergraduate at the University of Ottawa in 2014. But Milousis, now 28, has no doubt He helped her finish her specialization in political science and women’s studies three years later debt free.

“He did,” she laughs infectiously. “I ended up getting so many scholarships that the university was essentially paying me to attend.”

A richer perspective comes from her certainty that her very path to university, and ultimately to a law degree in 2020, developed not just from her gift for negotiating helpful Heavenly windfalls but from giving “my life to the Lord when I was six.”

Her early childhood commitment to Christ bore spiritual fruit on the cusp of adolescence when, as a 12-year-old in public school, she entered an essay writing contest determined to argue from a pro-life perspective.

A remarkable thing is that her family background was not a particularly fertile one for anti-abortion belief, and the school itself actively sought to thwart her picking the topic. More, she wasn’t overly sure of her own pro-life convictions until she researched the word “abortion” and found out its full meaning. Again, a divine hand was on her back.

“I like to say now that I’m a recovering competitive person. When I was young, I was very, very competitive. And I really wanted to win that competition. I wasn’t good at sports. I was good with my words and arguing,” she says.

“I decided to pray and ask God what topic to write about. I will say this wasn’t purely selfless. I was hoping God would give me the winning topic because I was mischievous and smart enough to know that He would know what the winning topic was going to be. So when God suggested to me the topic of abortion, I took that as Him answering the desires of my heart.”

What she could not foresee was the resistance her position on the topic would generate right from the teacher who had organized the event through to the school principal and all the way up the educational hierarchy. At one point, she was told her essay would be accepted but she would be disqualified from presenting her point of view. She refused to capitulate, recognizing what was going on as a test of faith as well as a struggle of ideas. When she was asked to remove references in her essay to “the Creator,” she flatly refused.

“I realized that if I was going to do this Christianity thing, I would have to do it 100 per cent. For me, it felt like plagiarism. The Lord had brought the issue to my attention. It wasn’t my idea, it was His, and I had to have Him in there.”

Her persistence got her to regional level competition where “of course I didn’t win at the Toronto District School Board with a pro-life speech.” What Milousis won in spades, however, was the victory of standing up for a belief, the triumph of giving an outcome to God, and the irrevocable relationship between the two.

“It was the first experience I had of having a conviction and being willing to stand for it in the face of opposition. It was really something I had to do on my own with the Lord.”

The experience provided a deep well of courage less than a decade later when she made what some might politely call the zany decision to take her foundational Christian socially conservative pro-life feminist views into the lion’s den of a university women’s studies department.

Milousis is adamant that she is a feminist. She insists on the modifier “traditional.”

“I think sexism is awful. I think ableism is awful. I am aligned with (feminist belief) that discrimination and marginalization and oppression occur, and must be fought. Even as a kid, I was always the one to say something wasn’t fair, and to make my voice heard about it.”

What she wasn’t prepared for, and had to quickly find a way through while safeguarding her own ideals and faith, was women’s studies doctrines of the day such as prostitution being empowering or the prohibition on calling an unborn child anything but a fetus.

“I had a teacher who, even in the context of a baby shower, would say ‘fetus shower’ or ‘congratulations on your fetus.’ It was so dogmatic.”

She adapted by adopting the Socratic approach of asking questions that led the interlocutor down the path of reductio ad absurdum. Difficult, at times depressing, there was even an incident of online bullying. She endured by drawing strength from conviction rooted in faith.

“My faith kept me going. There were times in class when the Lord would just kind of make a joke to help me through it.”

But out of the light and dark, law school beckoned almost as if God had rolled out the carpet and opened the door. Among those she met early on was Acacia founder Albertos Polizogopoulos, then a relatively newly minted lawyer himself.

“Albertos was my law hero. He was exactly the epitome of someone to emulate, and was someone I found very inspiring. He would encourage me by saying that no matter what my grades were, if he could get into law school and become a lawyer, I would be fine. That was typical of him, though I feel he probably undersold himself,” she says.

Not one in 10,000 who knew Albertos before his grievous death in 2024 might put his booming Greek personality and the phrase “undersold himself” in the same sentence. Milousis is emphatic, though, that he and Acacia co-founder Faye Sonier, his wife, were instrumental in inspiring her to specialize in social justice law and take up the causes of human rights and religious freedom.

Typical is the case she is pursuing through the courts now for the Christian Heritage Party, which was prohibited by the City of Hamilton from running a bus advertisement saying that being a woman is a biological reality. The CHP lost its claim at a lower court level, but Milousis is now seeking to overturn that decision at the Ontario Appeal Court level.

“I simply don’t believe it is the function of a government, federal, provincial or municipal to pre-emptively determine what is legitimate political discussion when you’re talking about a registered political party. I cannot see how democracy continues to function if that is permitted,” she says.

It’s a case where the personal and the political become the legal for Milousis, having learned very early on what it’s like to have authority forbid you from even raising a topic because it’s unpopular.

“I appreciate the importance of advocacy and I’m happy to be the person who advocates on behalf of those whose rights are being violated,” she says. “I don’t mind being the person who stands up and says the unpopular thing whether in court or the court of public opinion. I am in the field of law because the Lord calls me to it.”

And, on the evidence, Who even helped to pay for the call.

Peter Stockland leads the Strategic Communications division at The Acacia Group and is the author of The Acacia Arc newsletter. He has decades of experience as a Canadian journalist, including as editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, vice-president of English language magazines for Reader’s Digest Canada, and Publisher of the Catholic Register. Peter also enjoys writing short-stories and other fiction, which have been featured in numerous publications across Canada.