Liz and Rebecca process the 2024 election results. They discuss the challenges the new administration will bring, some under-the-radar encouraging election results, and how their organizations plan to continue fighting for secular democracy in the months and years ahead.
Background
Abortion
ACLU of Missouri’s abortion case – Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains & Planned Parenthood Great Rivers v. Missouri
AU’s abortion case – Rev. Blackmon v. Missouri
Results for education and school choice ballot measures, 2024
Project 2025
Resources
Rebecca Markert: Dear listeners, we have some big news to share. We Dissent is going to sound different to you this month. Unfortunately, Alison Gill is no longer a co-host for We Dissent. She was one of the original co-hosts when the pod began over two years ago, and we are so sorry to see her go. We’ve always joked on this podcast that we’re sponsored by court reform. Alison took that joke a little too seriously and has left American Atheists to be the director of nominations and Democracy at the National Women’s Law Center. So she’s still doing valuable work and again, we’re so sad to see her go, but we know she’s going to keep up the good fight at NWLC and maybe she’ll make some cameos in her new position in the coming year.
Liz Cavell: We know you’ll miss Alison as much as we will, but Rebecca and I will be here in your feed with monthly episodes on important issues affecting our secular democracy. We will continue to bring you interesting and inspiring guests and we will cover all of the battles of church and state that will be coming in the next few months and years. We want to thank you all for your support and now back to the show.
Rebecca Markert: Welcome to We Dissent, the podcast with secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty issues in our federal and state courts and our work to keep religion and government separate. I’m Rebecca Markert with Americans United for Separation of Church and State,
Liz Cavell: And I’m Liz Cavell with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Rebecca Markert: It’s been about a month since the November election. We’ve had some time to digest the outcome and to grieve the outcome. And for those of us who value the separation of church and state. This was a really hard one. We talked at length on this podcast about Project 2025 and what the impact of that would be. So the results were difficult to take in. We wanted to take time during this show to do a postmortem on the election. We are going to highlight some of the good news on the church state separation front from the election, but we also can’t ignore the reality of what’s to come with the second Trump administration and Project 2025.
Liz Cavell: Yep. So this will be Rebecca and I taking a sort of broad view. Obviously this is coming out before the transition and inauguration and we’re recording this in early December. So all of this is yet to come, but of course we already have some early kind of transition news and things that are signaling what we can expect. And of course, as we talked about during the past year, we know what the policy priorities and what Project 2025, the blueprint looks like for this second Trump administration. We Dissent did not exist during the first Trump administration, but we did and we all lived through it and Rebecca and I and Alison worked in the secular movement as attorneys back then too. And so things are different and arguably more alarming than they were back then. But I think it’s important to know that we as a movement have been through a lot of these ups and downs. And so we wanted to kind of just take a minute, take an episode, do a postmortem talk about what we’re expecting and how our organizations are bracing themselves for the fight ahead in the next four years.
Rebecca Markert:And I think that’s really important to point out is that our organizations have been planning for this particular outcome as well. And regardless of who was going to win in November, we knew that the battle for the separation of church and state was going to continue with the court the way that it is and the state of the law that we’ve been dealt over the last decade. So we’ve got our work cut out for us–
Liz Cavell: As usual
Rebecca Markert: As usual. So let’s go ahead and start with the good news. There was some good news from the November election and a lot of that revolved around ballot initiatives. These are the referenda that are on your ballot that have questions. Most of them are constitutional amendments, asking the people what they want their laws and their government to look like. And our organizations were tracking several ballot initiatives that touched on religious liberty in the separation of church and state generally. The first are ballot initiatives relating to the right to abortion care and abortion access. So we had a lot of successes with the abortion ballot initiatives this past November. This year, 11 states had ballot measures related to abortion and 10 of them involved state constitutional amendments to protect abortion. Seven of those passed, only three were rejected and one wasn’t a constitutional amendment. This was one in Nebraska.
It actually limited times when abortions could be performed and that was approved. So all of the stats that I just mentioned here were taken from Ballotpedia, which tracked a lot of these ballot measures having 11 states decide on the right to abortion in 2024, that was record setting. We’ve never had that many before and obviously that is a direct result of the Dobbs versus Jackson decision, which overturned Roe versus Wade. So I want to highlight one of the states where a ballot measure was approved and abortion rights were enshrined in the state constitution and that is in the state of Missouri. This is really significant because it was the first state to ban abortion after Roe fell. Literally within hours they announced that their trigger ban was in effect, and amendment three went up to the voters. That was to amend the Missouri constitution to provide the right for reproductive freedom and to provide that the state legislature may enact laws that regulate abortion after fetal viability.
And this measure passed in the state 51% in favor. So that was great news. The ACLU filed a lawsuit almost immediately the next day to implement the ballot measure and then also to challenge other abortion restrictions in the state under the new state constitution. I think that might’ve caused some confusion for people after they saw that the measure had passed and that the right to abortion exists again in the state of Missouri. Why would the ACLU file a lawsuit? Well, it was because they have to implement that ballot measure and then there’s a web of state laws that regulate abortion in some way. And not all of those were immediately changed because of the ballot measure. So there’s still some litigation that needs to be done, but one of the things that did change was Americans United’s lawsuit over the trigger ban in Missouri Blackmon v. Missouri. That case was rendered moot because of the ballot initiative. That law, as you may recall, was challenged because it was largely religiously motivated. So Americans United filed a lawsuit saying that it had violated the state’s Establishment Clause. Now that the state constitution has been changed, the lawsuit is no longer necessary. So Americans United voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit shortly after the amendment invalidated the abortion ban.
Liz Cavell: And that’s great news for both Missourians and our secular movement because that was a really important lawsuit trying to represent the conscience based rights of people other than Christians or even Christians who have a different interpretation of what their religious beliefs and conscience demands when it comes to abortion. And so that was a really important lawsuit and there was every hope, I think, in the secular movement that this amendment would pass and make that lawsuit unnecessary because of expanded abortion access and the abortion ban being rendered illegal now under their state constitution. So that’s great news.
I think it’s important too, Rebecca that we highlight Florida, even though Florida was one of those three out of ten constitutional amendments that failed, there’s no victory for democracy because 57.2%, I think at this point, Floridians wanted that amendment voted yes to protect abortion rights in their constitution, but it still failed because the state legislature messed around with the threshold for what a constitutional amendment needs to pass to make it 60%. So a 60% threshold was needed to pass the amendment and it only got 57, which is a very massive majority of Floridians. Given how polarized our country is right now, that’s a pretty high majority margin, but still failed. So the people of Florida voted for the amendment, but they’re not going to get it enshrined in their constitution, which is unfortunate because Florida has a six week ban on the books that’s affecting millions of American women.
Rebecca Markert: So obviously this is not going to be the end of the abortion question in the States.
Liz Cavell: What we’ve seen since Dobbs is that state, after state after state, the people are organizing getting the signatures or whatever’s necessary to put these questions on the ballot, directly to the people because again, the state legislatures and arguably the courts and Congress are ignoring the will of the people. The majority of people want access to safe legal abortion. And so I think we’ll continue to see states gathering the necessary signatures or criteria to put these issues on their ballots for people to vote on and bringing greater protections into their state constitutions. And so the results of this election on the abortion protection and access front were really encouraging and I think the ballot initiative movement continues and this election was another strong showing for that movement. So that’s good news.
Another really important outcome of this election that definitely flew under the radar for most people that are not us or in our movement, is that voters rejected taxpayer funding to private schools, also known as school voucher initiatives in the three states where it was up for a popular vote. So just like the abortion initiatives, there were ballot initiatives on the ballots of three states that would somehow affect tax payer funding to private schools. So in Nebraska, there was an initiative on the ballot to repeal the existing school voucher program. And then on the ballots in Kentucky and Colorado, there was a ballot initiative that would amend the state constitutions to allow public money to go towards private schooling or add a right to school choice to the state constitution. In all three of those states, the school choice position failed and by wide majorities.
Rebecca Markert: This was an incredible victory for our public schools. The voters were really soundly rejecting the idea that taxpayer funding could go to fund largely religious education and religious schools. In Nebraska, when we were talking about the majority, it was 57% voted to repeal that existing school voucher program. In Kentucky, it was 65%. That’s incredible. All of the 120 counties in Kentucky rejected the amendment that would allow public money to go toward private schooling, and that’s pretty much the same in Nebraska. It was almost all of the counties got a majority of people rejecting this school voucher program, and in Colorado, they did not reach the threshold of 55% to amend the state constitution to add that right to school choice. So these were huge victories for everyone who values secular public education.
Liz Cavell: And honestly, I think put it another way, the public supports our position on secular public schools and public funding when it comes to school vouchers and the so-called school choice movement, which is a movement to divert public taxpayer dollars to religious sectarian parochial schools take Colorado out of it for arguably being a blue slash purple state, but we’re talking Nebraska and Kentucky voting so overwhelmingly to reject these schemes. And in Nebraska, you have a situation where a 57% majority voted to take away an existing program. How often do we see that happen? But this was a, quote unquote, scholarship program, which is a way that legislatures have given tax dollars to religious schools by creating tax credit schemes that allow people to get tax write-offs for providing these private schools scholarships. And basically it’s just another roundabout way to get tax dollars into the coffers of private religious schools, and it had already existed in Nebraska and this is a 57% majority voting to repeal it.
And so I think that’s a pretty damning showing for these schemes. It’s kind of like the abortion case where despite the overwhelming popular opposition to this position, these conservative Christian nationalists and legislatures are just doing the bidding of these big interests who want to privatize public school because they want to put tax dollars into their private religious school industries and people don’t support it, but legislatures are still doing it. They’re continuing to put these schemes into law. There’s bills that exist right now in many states to create or expand school choice programs. Yet we see public sentiment is firmly against this in pretty much every demographic. Not that it will be taken to heart by people in government or elected officials who are determined to send tax dollars to religious schools, but I do think it was an important showing of public support for our public education system and a public rejection of tax dollars going to private schools, which includes religious schools. The people don’t want any part of that. And so I think that was an important showing and a real victory for the secular movement in public schools during an election where there weren’t a ton of silver linings.
Rebecca Markert: It’s also just I think, school choice and the voucher programs and things like that. They just have never seemed to be the sexy topics that you hear about in the news. And these ballot initiatives were the same. I mean, you didn’t really hear about those results much as you heard about the abortion measures and other things. And so sometimes I think when you’re working in this space, you think, well, people are just not getting that message or they’re not understanding it. We’ve got to figure out a way to make them care about this issue. And what this really highlighted I think for me was actually people do get it and they really value a secular public education and we can win on this issue.
Liz Cavell: Yeah, I think it also really was striking that these were votes against something like the proponents of the initiatives, especially in Kentucky and Colorado. The proponents of the initiative put this on the ballot to get something into their state constitution. A lot like the Choice abortion initiative proponents, the people are actively voting, no, no, we do not want to add this value to our state constitution. This is not a value that we share. This is just a case where the elected officials or this small interest group that wants public money to go to private schools and largely religious schools just does not represent the will of the people and they’re rejecting their vision for education in their states, and that’s really important. I found it very encouraging.
Rebecca Markert: Very much so. Although I do feel that there was a bit of confusion that I had the next morning too, especially when I was looking at the state of Missouri and you saw that they voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution, but then also went for Trump whose justices took that right away. Very confusing. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks trying to make it make sense, and I think there are people who are at a much higher pay grade than I am whose job it is to try to figure that out and work on that. That’s not what I need to do, but that I think was one of the hardest things after this election to come to terms with is how contradictory it all felt.
Liz Cavell: I know, and I think we should save five minutes at the end of the episode for feelings, but because the next four years at least is in front of us, we will obviously be covering so much of the developments and how it’s affecting secularism. This is not going to be our last episode on these subjects. We did want to talk about some of the positive results that might’ve been missed and then also some of the things that are keeping us up at night that are coming down the pike. But we’re not going to dive too deep into all the possible choose your own adventure scenarios that may await us. We’re just going to do kind of the broad overview of what we see now taking shape and what we’re worried about, and then we’ll do five minutes on feelings at the end. I definitely have some feelings.
Let’s move on, Rebecca to the bad news. I don’t think any of the tough results flew under the radar for anybody, but we can talk about how now that we’ve had a few weeks, how we and our organizations are sort of digesting the results and again, planning for the near future.
Rebecca Markert: So the first big thing is that Project 2025 is coming, it’s now a reality and we are seeing that bear out with the onslaught. It feels like an onslaught, of cabinet appointments and nominations that the upcoming administration is announcing pretty much on a daily basis.
Liz Cavell: So we’re going to just kind of touch on some of these and give a rough overview, but you don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter to find the ties to Project 2025 that most of these high level and cabinet level nomination announcements have. So I think probably the most obvious one, but definitely not the only one is the administration’s nomination for director of the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. That’s Russ Vought. I think I’m saying that right, but I also don’t care. That’s the OMB director and he actually served briefly as the OMB director during the first Trump administration, I think 20-2021, and he is a key architect of Project 2025. He served as the vice president of Heritage Action for America, which is obviously related to the Heritage Foundation before his work in the first Trump administration.
And then after leaving government, he has continued to sort of promote those same extreme religious ideological views through the Center for Renewing America, which is a similar right-wing Christian nationalist organization. That was one of the Project 2025 advisory board organizations. And he has said repeatedly and publicly that there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism. He embraces that identity and that view for America. Basically our nation is a Christian nation. It should influence our government and society and everyone else should assimilate. And that’s his view. And he wrote big parts of Project 2025. He’s big on increasing the president’s power dramatically and consolidating and expanding tons of power in the office of the president.
He has advocated using the military to respond to domestic unrest. In other words, to turn the military on American citizens who are engaging in free speech. He has advocated for and has been a big architect of gutting the civil service. He tried to do that at OMB the first time firing all the civil servants that work in the federal government and replacing them with loyalists and Christian nationalist ideologues. So it’s bad news and it’s Project 2025. And so I fear some of the distancing of the Trump campaign from Project 2025 may have been disingenuous.
Rebecca Markert: Really? [laughs]
Liz Cavell: Starting to look that way.
Rebecca Markert: Starting to look that way. I mean, we did a deep dive into Project 2025 a couple of episodes ago, and Liz talked at length about what the effect would be on the civil service and how horrible implementation of that would be on our government. And so if you really want to have nightmares, you can go revisit that episode again. But really, I mean, I think the scary thing is that everything that we warned about in Project 2025, now, the people who wrote that document are now being tapped to lead the agencies and offices that they want to radically transform and sometimes even dismantle entirely.
Liz Cavell: That’s right. So some other nominated high level administration officials and cabinet secretaries that we just want to highlight as literally a who’s who of Project 2025 supporters and contributors. Tom Homan, who was named as Border Czar who’s going to be incoming with the new administration, is listed among the contributors to Project 2025. He has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation and their border security and Immigration center. So obviously that appointment does not require Senate confirmation. That’s a czar position, but it was publicly announced and its signals further connection with Project 2025 and all of its ideology. Let’s see, who else do we have here, Rebecca?
Rebecca Markert: John Ratcliffe who was nominated to be the CIA director.
Liz Cavell: Important job.
Rebecca Markert: Yes, very important job. He was listed as one of the contributor to Project 2025’s mandate for leadership, and he was listed as a source in the blueprints intelligence community chapter.
Liz Cavell: So again, these are all of the Project 2025 ideologues and contributors. They’re being plucked from those ranks and nominated for all of these high level and cabinet level positions. So a really important one that maybe was a little unexpected in terms of Project 2025, I think is Linda McMahon.
Of wrestling fame, but also has long been a sort of Christian nationalist political actor. She is the chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, which is sort of a, I don’t know, a little friendly competitor I guess with Project 2025. They have their own ultra conservative Christian nationalist political blueprint. She helped start that America First Policy Institute, I think during the first Trump administration with this billionaire Christian nationalist pastor Tim Dunn, and it’s focused on destroying public education, privatizing public schools, diverting taxpayer dollars to private religious schools, all the things we just talked about, the people are vehemently against. They’re all about at America First Policy Institute. And Linda McMahon in particular is a big champion of privatizing public education. So she was the obvious choice to be nominated as the secretary for the Department of Education, which if you recall, Project 2025 calls for the shuttering of the Department of Education. So there’s a lot to unpack there.
Rebecca Markert: Yes, yes. I mean, I am curious to see why she would take a job that has a clear end date according to Project 2025, but she is someone who has been a longtime ally of Donald Trump and is somebody who’s been a longtime proponent for school choice and privatizing schools, as Liz had mentioned.
Liz Cavell: It makes sense in that lens, which is she is no friend of public education is all about undermining public education to the advantage of private schools and diverting funding to private schools, particularly religious schools. And so yeah, it’s literally, it’s the fox guarding the chicken coop or whatever that saying is.
Rebecca Markert: The hen house?
Liz Cavell: The hen house, the fox guarding the hen house literally is what I think of as this nomination. It’s putting in charge of, it’s kind of like a Betsy DeVos times a thousand. Putting in charge of public education, someone who is ideologically opposed to public education. So there you go.
Let’s see, who else. Stephen Miller is going to be the Deputy Chief of staff, which is not a Senate confirmed position, but is a very high level administration official and of course is very intimately aligned with Project 2025, even though I think he distanced himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, obviously his immigration policies and ideology was long overlapped with those of Christian nationalist groups and of course of Project 2025. And he’s also aligned with America First Legal, which is a contributor to Project 2025.
So let’s see, who else do we have in the Christian Nationalist who’s who? Kristi Noem will be the director of Homeland Security if she’s confirmed by the Senate. She is not to my knowledge, a contributor to Project 2025, but she is a devoted Christian nationalist. She is virulently anti-abortion. She is a promoter of public school prayer. She has sort of given her endorsement to all of the first Trump administration’s discriminatory actions including the Muslim ban, all of the heinous and cruel immigration actions. And so we should expect no change on the Homeland Security front if Kristi Noem is confirmed to that position.
Rebecca Markert: Another tie to Project 2025 is Karoline Leavitt, who is going to be the White House Press secretary. I also don’t know if I pronounced her last name correctly.
Liz Cavell: Yeah, also don’t care.
Rebecca Markert: Also don’t care.
Liz Cavell: She literally appeared in some of the training videos that we were talking about in the Project 2025 episode. She is very closely aligned and a contributor to Project 2025.
Rebecca Markert: She is the one who on the campaign trail was the one trying to distance the Trump campaign from Project 2025 saying that it was not related to our campaign and does not reflect official campaign policy.
Liz Cavell: Yep. Always awkward when you yourself are appearing in videos, right, produced by Project 2025. Yeah, no surprise there. And Rebecca, there’s so many other nominees to these cabinet positions that are really troubling, maybe not even because of ties to Project 2025 that we’re not even getting into in talking about Project 2025, but I mean, I think is worth kind of a mention because it shows this awful Christian nationalist bent and anti-science bent. So I’m just going to shout out some names. We’re still, while these people are still in the running for these positions, Pete Hegseth, who is being nominated to lead the Department of Defense. TV personality and a right wing Christian culture warrior, very extreme ideology just openly in terms of Christian nationalist bent and is being nominated to lead the Pentagon and all of the branches of the military. So I think that is really frightening. There’s lots of other things wrong with his nomination in addition to him being woefully unqualified and also a sex pest and apparently a drunk and disorderly person. But that I do think it’s even just talking about ideology in terms of Christian nationalist cabinet members. I think he’s right in the mold of that.
You have Mike Huckabee going as ambassador to Israel, who is literally an end times believer. That’s his whole ideology related to Israel, and he’s going to be our ambassador to Israel. It’s a biblically based worldview that he has openly professed. So that’s cool.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Can’t overlook him, leading the Department of Health and Human Services, anti-vaxxer, total anti-scientific views. And he’ll be in charge of public health, maybe not a Christian nationalist, but definitely an anti-science pick for our public health agencies, our research agencies.
Let’s see, who else do we have? We have Tulsi Gabbard who is being nominated to lead the Intelligence Services director of National Intelligence.
We have Elise Stefanik going to the United Nations. She has fashioned herself a big Christian nationalist, very aligned with Speaker Mike Johnson and of course the first Trump administration.
We’ve got who else? Janette Nesheiwat, again, don’t know how to say her name. She’s being put forth as the Surgeon General for the upcoming administration, Fox News, medical contributor and physician, and is all about miracles in medicine. Her book Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine showcases the power of Jesus guiding her work, leading challenging and dangerous medical missions throughout the world.
Okay, well that’s probably enough to give a flavor for the ideology and the litmus test that’s sort of taking shape for all of these upcoming cabinet appointments and high level staff appointments, some of which don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, many of which of course. And the one thing we didn’t mention, which I’m sure everyone noticed, is that there’s one party control of both houses of Congress going into this administration.
So there’s not going to be very many checks on the Project 2025 agenda going forward. And it starts with all of these cabinet appointments and one is more troubling than the next, and a great majority of them are direct architects of Project 2025 or it’s devotees or if not, they’re known advocates for a Christian nationalist ideology. And so, there’s definitely no secret about what policy priorities are going to be prioritized at each one of these agencies and just writ large in the executive branch going forward in the next administration.
So what does that mean? Just as a reminder of how Extremist Project 2025 is and some of the other policy playbooks that we’re talking about. America First, these groups and these individuals are whatever the campaign said to distance itself from Heritage and Project 2025 along with America First, they’re drafting executive orders as we speak, right?
There’s hundreds of them already being drafted for use in the new administration. And just as a refresher, we’re talking in Project 2025 about mandating these biblically based definitions of marriage and family throughout the federal government, dismantling civil rights protections in the name of religious liberty. In other words, giving a license to discriminate exemptions from civil rights laws based on religion. Along that line, allowing religious employers to discriminate against employees based on religious beliefs, turning the Department of Health and Human Services towards an anti-abortion agenda, the Department of Life, if you remember that from Project 2025, dismantling protections for LGBTQ plus Americans that exist throughout federal law by virtue of agency rulemaking. And of course, it’s been reported that the Project 2025 employee database is also being used to staff some of these positions, high level positions in terms of what’s envisioned for staff going forward at these agencies. So it’s not good, Rebecca.
Rebecca Markert: It’s not good. And I think that’s one thing that we probably doesn’t need to be pointed out, but I am just constantly thinking about as the new nominations are coming through, my newsfeed and my alerts, the first Trump administration wasn’t prepared and they took a long time to figure out who was going to lead what departments. There were a lot of acting directors throughout the first administration. Sometimes some of those agencies never got a permanent person to lead them, and that’s not what we’re seeing this time around. This time around. We’re really seeing, they had the playbook, they have a database, and from the moment that they received word that Trump won, they have been working to hit the ground running on January 20th. Like Liz mentioned, there are executive orders that are already being drafted. We have this really long list of cabinet appointees and other positions that are key to policy making for the executive branch from the White House. All of these positions are being filled very quickly by people we also now know. And that’s all very scary and upsetting because now they’re getting the second bite of the apple and they’re ready for it.
Liz Cavell: So we know by nominating these types of people and by signaling in the way that they have, the second Trump administration is looking to fast track the implementation of this radical Project 2025 agenda. So we know this and we knew that this outcome was a 50/50 proposition. What are our organizations doing and what can our supporters do?
Rebecca Markert: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we probably both would say is that we need you to join our organizations. You need to sign up for news alerts, sign up for action alerts. Both of our organizations have legal teams and policy teams that are standing by to address any infractions of the separation of church and state or religious liberty overall, we’re here to fight back against Christian nationalism and by signing up to be a member of our organization, you can read up on our work in the courts, in the legislature and elsewhere. This is going to be really important. We need your support and quite frankly, your dollars in order for us to fight what’s coming.
Liz Cavell: Yeah, it’s going to be a grueling few years, especially with so few checks on the executive branch at this point because of the results of the election. But we have always been watchdog functioning groups, and so we are well prepared and well versed in holding the lines that still exist, pushing where we can to advance secularism and our mission.
We are, like Rebecca said, we have long been focused on levers of power outside of the courts as well as the courts. So by signing up for our news and action alerts, you can hear about what your congressional elected officials are doing and how you can use your voice to influence them or to make your position known so that we can bring power to bear where we have it. That’s not always going to be in the executive branch, although you’ll hear from us about rulemaking, which goes through a public comment process. And our organizations are very engaged in that process. We were throughout the past few administrations, and we’ll continue to be, which is making public comment on proposed rules. And it’s not like glittery or sexy type work that you’re necessarily going to hear about in the news, but if you join forces with our organizations, we will let you know when those things are happening and when you’re in a position to bring your power to bear.
Rebecca Markert: And of course, we’re still going to be working in the courts. Our organizations have several lawsuits that we brought together in state courts and in federal courts, and those cases are continuing and we are not going to change course because of the outcome of the election. So our programs are still going very strong and we, like Liz had mentioned, we survived one Trump administration and we’re ready to fight again against a second.
I’m going to bring up another thing that you can do that is probably not going to sit well with a lot of listeners, especially after we just went through this whole doom and gloom of we don’t have the executive, we don’t have the legislature, we don’t have the courts, but I think it is still very, very important and worthwhile to contact your legislator and let them know what you want to see in a cabinet nominee, what you want to see in their nomination process, the types of questions that you would like your senators to ask them during these hearings.
I know there is probably a lot of sentiment out there that it’s not productive and they’re not going to listen to me anyway. But I think it’s really important that at this time where there’s so much at stake that people do not stay silent. It’s really easy to want to put your head down and just kind of muddle through. But really now is not the time. We really need to swell our ranks and have people say when they disagree with something. The name of our podcast is We Dissent. And it is incredibly important that you register that dissent, not just because they need to be forced out of their own echo chambers, but also because in the analog of history, we need to show that not all Americans were for the policies that we are about to encounter.
Liz Cavell: That’s right. And that kind of naturally brings us to feelings, which is it’s really hard and it’s disheartening and it’s exhausting. We all agitated and stayed engaged through a first Trump administration and a pandemic, and now here we are again at the start of another difficult four years for secularism and all of these civil rights that we care about so much. And it does feel just so exhausting and discouraging, and we feel that too. But again, it is really the exact kind of thing that the playbook counts on is the disengagement of so many people who even though their voting behavior when it comes to candidates is out of step and it makes no sense, and we can talk about our feelings on that. Most people don’t want Project 2025. We know that, that people don’t support draconian anti-abortion policies and they don’t support defunding public schools.
And so a minority that needs to just put our heads down and go away, we need to remain engaged, and we can’t be desensitized to these incursions on our liberties, even though they keep coming and it just feels exhausting. One way to do that when you are exhausted is to join our ranks and let our organizations be that bulwark. And that’s how we can get through these times together is by joining forces, organizations like ours that are still working to stand up for civil rights and secular democracy, no matter which way the winds blow. That’s right. It is encouraging when we see the ballot initiative voting margins and results on some of these issues. So many of these issues, honestly, where the public is very aligned with a secular progressive policy vision for America. But for some reason when it comes to candidates, many things are getting lost in translation. And that is a political project to figure out. But we still have to stand for those policies that advance secular democracy and religious liberty for all Americans. And that’s what we’re going to continue to do, and we’ll cover so many of these policies and executive actions and all the other government actions that are coming in the next months and years. We’ll cover here and our organizations will be actively working to fight against and to protect our cherished constitution and the separation of church and state. So thanks for hanging in there with us.
Rebecca Markert: I think that’s a really good way to wrap, Liz. Well done.
Liz Cavell: Thank you.
Rebecca Markert: So that’s it for today’s episode. I’m Rebecca Markert.
Liz Cavell: And I’m Liz Cavell. And if you haven’t already, please follow us on our socials. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram, we’re on X. And please also remember, let us know how you’re liking the show by leaving us a review. You can also find us we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
Rebecca Markert: We Dissent is a joint production of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is hosted by attorneys Liz Cavell and me, Rebecca Markert. Other production support comes from Greta Martens, audio engineering provided by Audio for the Arts based in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks for listening.
