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Alison guides us through the legislative process and how it varies by state and what to expect in the 2023 legislative sessions. We discuss how a bill becomes a law, what bills we’re tracking for next year, and give advice on how you can become an effective advocate!
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Rebecca Markert:
Welcome back to We Dissent, the podcast with four secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty in federal and state courts, and our work to keep religion and government separate.
I'm Rebecca Markert, the legal director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Monica Miller:
And I'm Monica Miller, the legal director and senior counsel at the American Humanist Association.
Alison Gill:
I'm Alison Gill, vice President for Legal and Policy with American Atheists.
Liz Cavell:
And I'm Liz Cavell, associate counsel at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Rebecca Markert:
This is our last episode of the year. It's December, our holiday season, so merry winter solstice. Happy holidays. We here at We Dissent wish you the best for whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year.
And right now most people are thinking about wintertime things, cozy fires, hot cocoa with their littles and what gifts they're going to give their loved ones. But Alison Gill, she's thinking about legislation.
Election day has come and gone, and soon we will have new legislators being sworn in, in states across the country, and legislative sessions will be convening. So in today's episode, Alison will guide us through the upcoming 2023 state legislative session and what we should expect next year.
Alison Gill:
Thanks so much, Rebecca. Yes, it is an exciting time for those who do state legislative work. Right now, there's a lot of preparation for the next incoming legislative session, and also we're starting to see bills pre-filed, which in some states is great and in some states is terrifying. But, happy to go into that a little bit more in a bit. But let's talk about the state legislative session first.
So beginning in January, state legislatures will begin to go into session. This is usually the first year in almost every state, the first year of a two year session. Some states only have one year session, they're out of session the second year. But most states stay in session for about six months. And that varies a lot by state. And that's something I'll probably say like a thousand times today. Varies a lot by state, because, because that's the number one rule when it comes to state legislation is that they're all special, unique snowflakes.
They're all different and you know, their rules vary so widely. It's hard to draw a generality sometimes, but so we're gonna have them all go into session mostly in January, although some of course, like Florida for instance, start in March for some reason. And states like Texas, they only go once every other year.
In 2022, there were about 100,000 state bills that were considered across the country and will likely to see even more next year because as I mentioned, a lot of states like Texas don't meet in the even years. They only meet in the odd year. So 2023 will be the first year of their session. And Texas is such a fantastic state, I guess in quotes. They have I think 120 day session and they consider usually the second or third highest number of bills of any state in the country. So it's just this mass rapid chaos.
Liz Cavell:
Oh, that's kind of terrifying that for every, every horrifying bill you heard about in 2022, Texas was on the bench. So just imagine that plus Texas.
Rebecca Markert:
Why did they do that every other year? Do you know?
Liz Cavell:
That's a good question.
Alison Gill:
It's a holdover. Most states don't do that, but some states they sort of, especially states that are, have lower population or have sort of a cultural bias against legislating, like they don't think the government should be doing much, if that makes sense. Maybe meet every other year, but even then sometimes the governor or the state legislatures themselves can call what's called a special session where they meet for a particular purpose and consider bills. So even in states like Texas, that can happen in the off year, for example.
Rebecca Markert:
Okay.
Alison Gill:
During the year, as all these bills are introduced or pre-filed, which means be before the session starts or introduced when the session starts, we comb through them diligently trying to find ones that are relevant to our issues and we track those bills using special programs and make available lists of relevant bills on our website. And lots of other organizations do this as well. But currently we're tracking nearly 800 bills.
Now, next year those will all go away and we'll have to start over from the beginning going through thousands of bills and trying to filter out which ones are the ones that are worth tracking and are relevant to our issues. I'll say, we're gonna provide a list of resources, but you can go to the American Atheist Legislative Tracker for example, and see all the bills when they're introduced across the country in your states. And those are really helpful. Like other organizations like the Guttmacher Institute track Reproductive Freedom or Reproductive related bills. And so there's different organizations that do different segments because this session's just getting started, it's also such an important time to get involved.
We need help to stop all this negative legislation we're talking about, as I mentioned, hundreds of bills. And if you’ve not already done so, we encourage you to sign up for action alerts with all of our organizations and we keep you informed about when bills are cropping up in your state and let you know the best way to take action.
Like we make it very simple for people if they sort of sign up, we'll send you a letter when something needs to be done, like an email needs to go to a state lawmaker or the governor and it's like two clicks to actually send out the letter. We'll actually write it for you and everything. So it's really easy and it's a way to sort of start influencing lawmakers in an active way.
Rebecca Markert:
We will put links to those signups in the show notes, so check that out if that's something that you wanna get involved with.
Alison Gill:
We also, American Atheists, we also publish a report that looks at positive and negative laws that affect religious equality and church state separation every year. So we're gonna be publishing that in the beginning of January and it provides an important benchmark for what the law is in each state.
We track over 50 different legal items in every state, plus DC and Puerto Rico about church state separation and other related issues like reproductive freedom, LGBTQ equality, a whole bunch of different issues so that you can see what the law actually is. Cuz if you want to push to change the law or to try to stop bad bills or move forward with positive ones, you have to know where you're starting from. Right. It's really helpful for that purpose and that's available at atheist.org/states. I thought it'd be good to go through the legislative process sort of as a refresher because you know, we all learn about it through like the Kid House Rock video.
Rebecca Markert:
I'm Schoolhouse Rock, Schoolhouse Rock <laugh>.
Alison Gill:
Y'all learn about the Schoolhouse Rock video and, but like let's do a refresher so that we can actually understand how it actually works in today's world. So first, usually a sponsor introduces a bill and usually this must be done by a certain deadline. Like for example, mid-January or the end of January, all the bill sponsors of the thousands of different bills that a legislature considers have to be introduced. It varies a little bit by state.
Also, sometimes there's rules like lawmakers can introduce a limited number of bills, like five or they must introduce a version in both chambers, which is a rule in Tennessee for example, for a bill to move forward, it has to be in both chambers like the Senate and the House. So that's the first step.
Next either at the same time or afterwards we see you see co-sponsors join bills and these are other lawmakers that basically sign up to put their support behind a bill so that we know how popular the bill is. And if the bill has lots of co-sponsors supporting it, it gives an indication that it's something that you know, has broad support and especially if it has bipartisan co-sponsors for example.
Liz Cavell:
So, Alison, can I jump in real quick and ask a question? So this is for our listeners because it would be embarrassing if I didn't know this myself, but is it true that lawmakers can only introduce bills during the first period of a legislative session? So in other words, whatever the deadline might be, and it varies state by state, it's not the case that at any given point during the legislative session you can come up and introduce the bill.
Alison Gill:
This is a great question with a complex answer. Okay. So first of all, it varies by state. Some states have no rules on limiting when you can introduce bills, most states do. Secondly, you can in some states sort of hollow out a bill and put your own language in place of that bill instead. So for example, you can just rep, do a full replace of the text of a bill and make a bill that exists previously into a bill that you want it to be. Right. Also sometimes legislatures can suspend the rules and this happens a lot.
So the rules committee in the legislature can say there are no rules and let people introduce bills and sort of suspend their own rules to make that happen. So those are three ways, there are other ways that things can happen, but sort of area of law is very complex because it varies so much by state and also the rules are ever changing.
Liz Cavell:
Right? Yeah. Okay. So exactly as I expected. Arbitrary and subject to the whims of legislatures.
Alison Gill:
Well the majority anyway,
Liz Cavell:
Because I mean, it sounds like even in states where they've established a deadline for filing bills early in the legislative session, which makes sense, but it sounds like there's endless ways of circumventing changing, suspending the rules to get around that.
Alison Gill:
Yes. And in some states are just weird. Like I'm thinking of Connecticut and Missouri for example. Connecticut, they don't actually introduce texts, they just introduce like a title and then they add the text later when it goes to committee if it ever moves forward. Oh. So you, if you go look at Connecticut bills, you'll just see a bunch of like empty shells and then Missouri you have like lawmakers introduce like 10 different bills on the same topic and then they all sort of get blended together by the committee and that's the bill that moves forward. So there's, there's all sorts of weird examples like that.
Monica Miller:
Alison, actually, sorry, is there a rule, like I took legislation in law school but I, and I vaguely remember there was some rule, and this maybe only applies to federal legislation, but like the title has to somewhat correspond with what the language and the bill is.
Alison Gill:
Yeah, that's a good question. That does vary by state and a lot of states have what's called a germaneness rule. So basically the title has to align or like all the issues the bill covers have to be germane to the main topic. So you can't have a bill that I don't know, uh, requires a display of "In God We Trust" in school classrooms. And at the same time, I don't know, creates religious exemptions, for foster care adoption. Right?
Monica Miller:
Right. It's completely, and then it's titled like Save the Whales
Alison Gill:
Well sure, usually the titles are well often they're sort of either describe what the bill is or they're sort of phrase in a way that's propagandistic, if that makes sense.
Monica Miller:
Yeah, it does. Yeah. I guess what I was wondering is if they could sneak bills in through false labels, like save the whales but it's actually kill the whales
Alison Gill:
Well yeah. You could call it protecting our nation's oceans bill. Right, right. And then who's to say what's protecting? You know what I mean? Right. So that sort of thing is possible,
Monica Miller:
At least in California, like voter referendums of that sort of legislative process, like using the state constitutions through elections to get bills or legislate through the state constitutions basically. And in California it seems like a couple times in history, like voters were genuinely confused by the prompt because it was exactly like what you said. It was like protect the oceans and it was like for the profiteers and you know, and it's like, and people were just kind of, well-meaning people were looking at this like, wait, am I voting for or against same-sex marriage? People meant to vote the other way. And that's just like horrific to me.
Rebecca Markert:
This just reminds me of when I worked for Senator Russ Feingold and in 2001 there was a bill called the USA Patriot Act and I remember he was the only senator to vote against that bill. And I remember him saying, it is not going to be easy walking onto that Senate floor and voting against the Patriot Act.
Liz Cavell:
Right, exactly.
Monica Miller:
It's like how you label these things can be kind of significant in their own right.
Alison Gill:
That's a great example. And another example is from Kansas, the anti-abortion ballot measure that was proposed there and fortunately voted down, but the language which was decided and agreed to by sort of coordination between the, you know, the anti-abortion groups and like the state powers that be, you know, like the AGs office put together this language which is just complete gobbledygook. So here it is, I wanna read it here.
The Value Them Both Amendment would affirm there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion or to receive government funding of abortion and would reserve to the people of Kansas through their elected state officials, the right to pass laws to regulate abortion, including but not limited to in circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother, a vote for the Value Them Both Amendment would affirm there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion or to require the government funding of abortion and would reserve to the people of Kansas through their elected of state officials the right to pass right to pass laws to regulate abortion.
A vote against the amendment would make no changes to the Constitution of Kansas and could restrict the people through their elected state legislatures from regulating abortion by leaving a place a recently recognized right to abortion.
So basically it's, it's framing it as if freedom is you know, slavery is freedom, that sort of stuff. It's sort of saying the opposite of
Liz Cavell:
<laugh>.
Monica Miller:
Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly the kind of example that I was thinking of is like, can they use this too, for that kind of trickery, gross.
Liz Cavell:
Yeah. Well Alison back to the legislative process, cuz you were saying sponsor intro introduces bill, bill gathers co-sponsors. What happens next in these state legislative processes?
Alison Gill:
Yeah, so the next, the bill is assigned to a committee and it's assigned to a committee based on the subject matter usually. So state legislatures have all types of committees from the judiciary committee to the education Committee, to the Roads and Transportation Committee, all sorts of different committees.
So based on the topic of the bill, it's supposed to go to a committee, though that does vary by state. I'm gonna say that every time I speak. I think the committee chair has a lot of power. They can then choose whether or not the bill gets a hearing. And a hearing is when proponents and, and opponents of the bill come in and talk about whether the bill should be passed or not passed. And it's a great chance for the public to engage basically to either push forward or try to stop a bill. And this is the place where most bills stall because most bills never get hearings. They just sort of die.
They go into the committee and they just sort of end there and nothing happens to them for two years or until the legislative session ends. Although some states require that every bill get a hearing, that is the exception. But states like New Hampshire require every single bill to get a hearing, which is crazy if you consider New Hampshire has such a large number of members of the State House.
So in committee the bill can be amended. It may or may not get a vote to leave committee. In some states the vote is like right after the hearing and in some states there may be a delay or even a sign- really significant delay after the hearing and before the vote.
But if it does move forward, it usually either goes to additional committees based on its nature or it goes to the floor. If it costs money, for example, it might go to the ways and means committee or the finance committee. It usually goes to something called the rules committee or sometimes the leadership committee which basically decides is it gonna go to the floor and they calendar it for like a vote by the full chamber, which is a floor vote. Those committees sort of provide an oversight role.
Liz Cavell:
Alison, can anyone amend a bill or is this reserved to the committee members that are reviewing the bills or sponsors or how, who, how does it get determined in most states how a bill can be amended and by whom?
Alison Gill:
Sure. So, there's a few different ways a bill can be amended. First of all, the sponsor can file in a lot of states what's called a sponsor amendment or a friendly amendment. The committee, if it's in committee, ultimately makes decisions about amendments. So they get to vote on that. Committee members can propose amendments. Sometimes other members of the legislature can testify for a committee or ask for an amendment or just do that behind the scenes. And once it gets to the floor, then there can be floor amendments and those are also open. So that can be like that. That's a little bit more, depending on the state, but most amendments happen in committee.
Liz Cavell:
So sponsors that introduce these bills don't necessarily have control over the bill as it moves through the legislative process?
Alison Gill:
Absolutely not. Yeah, that's a really good point because sometimes you end up up with a sponsor, their bill is admitted in ways they really don't want, and then sometimes they call upon like groups like ours that might be supporting a bill to, to say, okay, well we're gonna have to reverse course and try to stop this bill because if the bill was amended so poorly that it's detrimental, sometimes it's necessary for to take action and see if we can stop the bill. It might be like a runaway train.
Liz Cavell:
Got it.
Rebecca Markert:
Along those same lines, the rules committee or the leadership committee could do the same too. A bill that's really popular, they can just stop it in its tracks. Is that correct?
Alison Gill:
Yes. Ultimately the chamber of leadership has a lot of power to decide if the bill is heard by the whole chamber. But I will say there are some, some states ways to get stuff bills out of a committee. Like sometimes you get a committee chair that just hates the bill and won't move it forward. That happens more than you might suspect.
Sometimes there are rules that a majority of the rest of the body can take a vote to pull a bill outta committee and stick it in a new committee or like leadership can do that. So there are sometimes ways to get around these roadblocks, but a hostile committee chair or hostile especially, you know, leadership of the committee can make it very, very hard to move a bill forward. And once a bill passes one chamber, it must go to the other chamber the same way. It's basically the same process.
If the second chamber makes any amendments, it has to go back to the first chamber for an agreement. You know, do they agree to those changes? And ultimately in some states it might go to what's called a conference committee where you have designated people from each chamber trying to get together and work out the details on the bill. But those try to resolve those changes. And finally if it manages to pass all that, it goes to the governor for signature or veto. And unlike at the federal level where if the president doesn't do anything, the bill just dies.
A lot of states have what's called a pocket pass that's called a pocket veto. When the president does that, a pocket pass means if the governor takes no action, the bill just becomes law. So if they vary a little bit by state, we should keep a counter of that. Also, you know, sometimes governors have line item vetoes too. Now at the federal level that was struck down by the Supreme Court when they had line item veto bills. But in states it's sometimes allowed based on the state constitution. So sometimes that means the governor can just like strike parts they don't like, especially for budget bills.
Rebecca Markert:
What happens after the governor's veto? Is there a way to go back to the legislature? How often does that happen where the legislature takes it back and overrides the veto?
Alison Gill:
Sure. Well you won't be surprised to hear that. It varies by state and-
Rebecca Markert:
It's gonna be the title of our drinking game.
Alison Gill:
Oh, I think so. Yeah. It's gotta be title. So yeah, it, it does go back to the state to the legislature and usually it's a two-thirds vote to overcome a veto. Though of course it varies by state and sometimes they have a special veto session, like a, they have their session ends, there's like a time for the governor to act and then they have a veto session to sort of reconsider bills that were vetoed that that's not every state, but sometimes states have that.
Liz Cavell:
Well one of us brought up the question and now I'm just curious about unicameral legislatures. We only know of one, which is Nebraska. Well, I only know of one, Alison. You can tell me if there's another one, but
Alison Gill:
There are two
Liz Cavell:
Really?
Alison Gill:
Can you guess the second one?
Rebecca Markert:
I feel like it's,
Liz Cavell:
Is it a full state? Does it have statehood? No. Is it DC?
Alison Gill:
It's DC
All:
Ahhhh
Alison Gill:
So Nebraska and DC are unicameral, which means they only have one chamber and Nebraska actually has a nonpartisan chamber. So they don't actually have party designations. DC does have party designations
Liz Cavell:
And this process is similar but only has to happen once. Yes. Yeah. That feels,
Alison Gill:
Which is great, that
Liz Cavell:
Feels more efficient.
Alison Gill:
Helped pass a lot of bills in DC and it's fantastic in comparison to most states. <laugh>.
Rebecca Markert:
Well I always like to mention Ernie Chambers when we talk about Nebraska because he was obviously a very good activist for state church issues. Was the famous plaintiff in the Marsh v. Chambers decision from the Supreme Court back in the 1980s where he challenged their practice of having prayer before the state legislature. He's also noted for, I think he sued God at one point and that was thrown out. God could not appear. He also notably for me, I I find this very notable he ended the death penalty in the state of Nebraska, and was term limited out because he was such a, a thorn in their sides
Liz Cavell:
Then then voted back in right after he
Rebecca Markert:
Left. Yes. For term limits Yes. Then voted back in and now I think he's officially out. But every time I think of the Unicameral legislature, Nebraska, I think of Ernie.
Alison Gill:
That's fantastic. And there's lots of other really terrific atheist lawmakers in Nebraska as well. I'm thinking of Megan Hunt for example. Yes,
Rebecca Markert:
She just recently spoke at FFRF'S convention and she was amazing and talked in her speech to the convention about Ernie mentoring her really on a lot of the issues. And so we are gonna be having that speech up on our YouTube channel soon, so you should check it out. But she was an amazing and great, great speaker.
Liz Cavell:
She's a state legislator who openly identifies as a secularist. Right. A legislator who cares about secular government and,
Alison Gill:
And also openly LGBT.
Liz Cavell:
Ah, cool. And I wanted to here, jump in and flag a point that I thought of in prep, which is caucuses like, so a lot of us hear about this on the national level, so I just wanted to like maybe explain what is a caucus and on the state level, we at FFRF have been interested in trying to encourage more state legislators to form secular caucuses. Notably they've recently been formed in New Hampshire and in Minnesota. But like when we hear about that, what is a caucus Alison and what's its function in these legislatures?
Alison Gill:
Sure. So a caucus is simply a group of lawmakers. Now it can be formal or informal. So a formal caucus is recognized by the legislative body and they might get funding and staffed to sort of achieve something like maybe they're focused on, I don't know, on transportation issues. So they're not part of a committee, but it's a caucus on transportation issues. But it can be like an identity-based caucus. Like at the federal level we have the Congressional Black Caucus for example, which is a really good ex-, you know, they also have the Equality caucus which is about LGBT civil rights.
And so that's, you know, those are, those are examples they can be informal too, which are just sort of loose coalitions of lawmakers that have like an issue in common that they talk about. And caucuses can host events, they can write letters together, they can discuss legislation, they can do all sorts of different things. We've actually been working to support state caucuses on this issue too. We helped form an organization with a lot of other national groups called the Religious Equality and Democracy Legislator Network that's going to be supporting these caucuses in the two states you mentioned Minnesota and New Hampshire and work to grow them in other states.
So it's something that we're actively sort of thinking about this because let me give you an example. Project Blitz, which we've talked about before, is a Christian nationalist campaign to introduce like Christian nationalist legislation in different states.
They use a caucus model to push their stuff in states they have these prayer caucuses and you know, we need ways to sort of compete with that and say like, okay, if you wanna bring your religion or lack of religion into your law making and use that to help inform like what sort of laws you wanna pass, there's only one choice and it's these prayer caucuses, but maybe there should be other ways for people to think about religion and their work and serving the public.
Monica Miller:
That's great that you brought up, um, Project Blitz cuz it was gonna be one of my questions later. I'm curious if the Project Blitz model would work for some of the legislation that we want to push through, like equality kind of measures or you know, keeping church and state separate.
Alison Gill:
So the Project Blitz model I would say has a few components but two of them are they have a catalog of model bills that they can push one lawmaker to another and they have these prayer caucuses in states throughout the country, right. And they're often staffed, they often have a staff person that helps sort of facilitate the caucus. And so we do have some model bills and that's something that a lot of organizations out both in our area and outside have model bills on different types of topics. So we've created three or four of them that we make available.
And I just mentioned, you know, we're supporting caucuses, maybe not as uniformly, I think they're still getting off the ground, but those types of things are common ways that advocacy happens. You know, working on bills and adapting them by state and also creating groups of lawmakers and states that are for focusing on a particular issue area. The thing about Project Blitz is it was just so sinister, it was focused on Christian nationalism, it was hiding behind religion and very secretive and it had these multiple different stages and they published it all on their website. So altogether it just painted this picture of like this secret out-of-state influence sort of thing.
Liz Cavell:
Okay. Interesting.
Rebecca Markert:
I think we should also mention here the Congressional Free Thought Caucus. We're focusing today on state legislatures, but we do have the Congressional Free Thought Caucus in the US Congress and have worked pretty closely with members of that caucus.
Liz Cavell:
Yeah, Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman are some, and Pramila Jayapal is also in the Free Thought Caucus now and it's grown slowly but steadily and that's been an important achievement in pushing some of our federal legislative priorities is having a caucus that can support some of those efforts.
Rebecca Markert:
And it's a great example for state legislators as well.
Liz Cavell:
Totally. One of the things before we moved on to 2023 and we're just talking about processes for legislating, I wanted to talk a little bit about, so the, the ways that law changes happen and it should happen through the legislative process, but what we're seeing a lot of in this, especially in the post Dobbs reality in 2022, is how people can circumvent hostile legislatures on some of these issues that are really popular, but legislatures are way more conservative than the general public on some of these issues like abortion.
So obviously we talked earlier about ballot initiatives and changing state constitutions as a way of sort of short circuiting this whole process that Alison just described because you can't get some of these legislators to support some of these really popular pieces of policy. So I think it's important both to just distinguish in the minds of just the average every day non-political junkie that like these are two separate ways that laws are being changed. Right?
When you see, oh my gosh, Kentucky rejected this ballot initiative to ban abortion or what happened in Kansas or in Minnesota they passed a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights. These are things that are sort of doing an end run around the legislative process because the state legislators are out of step with what the public wants. So they go to the state constitution to make these changes through the people voting yes or no.
Alison Gill:
I would say that going to the constitution is actually significant even if we put aside the legislature because that makes it more set in stone, if that makes sense. It makes it much more difficult. Like some of the states are swing states and they might end up with a hostile legislature. So sometimes even in a state that's supportive, it might make sense to go to the ballot, you know, do ballot measures to put a language into the state constitution.
Another way we're seeing states sort of get around their legislatures when they're not acting in a more negative way is on trans issues. Like for example in Texas and Florida, you know, I mentioned Texas was not in session this past year. Well that didn't stop Governor Abbott and Attorney General Paxton from implementing these ridiculously basically declaring trans healthcare for minors is child abuse and trying to, I implement that, fortunately they've been stopped by the courts but they, they're just sort of reinventing, you know, reclassifying the law and declaring this child abuse. And it's ridiculous and that's why it didn't stand up in court. But there's always a risk and forward.
Monica Miller:
There's always a risk. They move the needle, they keep moving the needle over and over to these absurd things where they flip it on its head so much that now that's gonna be called child abuse. So now we have to come over here, what we saw 10 years ago, like you know, with the Project Blitz stuff, who knows if this is really gonna materialize and we're gonna have a Trump president and you know, all these supreme court justices that are appointed by Trump.
We didn't see that either. And I think you're right that we shouldn't just brush stuff off as not a concern. Even though the courts have sort of so far overturned those challenges, that doesn't mean that they'll continue to do so with our opponents being as aggressive and slimy, I guess as they are with distorting reality and science and scientific fact and truth.
Alison Gill:
I mean in Texas it was stopped because it was not, he didn't have the power, it was not legislated. But I can tell you we've already seen 20, 25 pre-filed bills in Texas that are terrible that go way beyond what the Governor and Attorney General did. And if they were passed into law, I mean they might still be stopped in court, it would have to be different justifications because then you'd have the legislature giving them the power. So it's pretty scary.
Monica Miller:
Absolutely.
Alison Gill:
Another good example though is Florida, where Governor DeSantis stacked the board of medicine, the state Board of Education and is passing through all these terrible policies without sort of, even though they're completely counter to evidence and to medical best practices just because they have the power to do that. So he's using the agency process effectively, which was what makes DeSantis in my opinion so scary because he's both terrible and a bully, but much more competent than maybe some former presidents.
Liz Cavell:
So if you remember our episode on Regulations Rule!, we talked all about this mostly focused on the federal machine of administrative law that exists under the executive, but of course a similar structure exists under the governors of each state. And that is a place where governors who are so inclined to evil can grab power and change the agency regulations to reflect this policy preference for making miserable the lives of trans kids and other policy preferences of people like Ron DeSantis.
But it's a place where power exists and it's another place where executives can somewhat circumvent the legislative process when it comes to pushing their agenda on these issues. So before we move on to predictions and 2023 legislation, maybe we should talk about how national groups engage with the state legislative process.
Alison Gill:
There's a variety of different ways that national groups do. I mean we're talking about states, so obviously as national groups we have smaller staff and we're not based in every state. So when we do state level work, we really work closely with local state part organizations and often form coalitions to do bills. Like for example, we might work with the local ACLU in the state, we might work with LGBT groups. All of us have a lot of affiliate secular groups in different states. So we might work with those and other types of advocates, but it is really critical.
We might know what's going on and have like a trend, you know, see trends across the country and know different types of bills that we're seeing be introduced and might have a lot of expertise about stopping bills or you know, talking points and that sort of thing. But local folks often have the most expertise about what's been happening in their state.
They often know the history and have connections. So it's really critical that we work with them and that's, that's basically the way we work as in a concert with all these different state groups in order to push forward good bills or try to stop bad bills, we also arrange people to go testify like hearings. That's a really important way. So you know, if you are an advocate in a state, you live near a state capitol and want to get involved with testifying, we're always looking for folks to go do that and it's lots of fun. It's really a good time. So that's another way.
Rebecca Markert:
Do you ever travel to states, Alison, to testify?
Alison Gill:
Oh absolutely. Sometimes it depends on the bill and often we have local folks in states from like chapters or other groups and sometimes we just, most times we just submit electronic testimony. But especially if it's like a really important bill we might fly out there and that varies by group. Like some groups like HRC testify in person all the time.
Rebecca Markert:
I have a question that might be a little off track but not really because we are getting a lot of questions from our supporters, what can they do because they just feel like they need to do something more, especially after the year that we've had. And a lot of times when we say stuff like, you can go testify against this bill or in support of this bill, they're a little hesitant to do that because it sounds pretty scary to get in front of a committee of legislators and speak publicly on the record.
So can you just talk a little bit about what that process is like? How scary is it? Is that something that people should avoid or how do they get over that sort of fear and trepidation of doing something like that?
Alison Gill:
Okay. I do trainings on this sort of thing all the time and the number one thing I try to get across is lawmakers are just people and most times they know less about the subject than you do if you're going to testify. So like they're just people just because they're sitting on a higher chair than you doesn't mean that they, you know, they're elected. I mean some, some dumb people somewhere voted for them doesn't mean that they know more than you.
So usually when you go testify you speak for three minutes and you know, even if you mess up badly, we're talking about three minutes. And so it's not that big a deal, nothing bad is gonna happen. Sometimes it's valuable to just show up in what they call sign in. So basically you show up and you sign a form that says you were there and what your, what side you're supporting for against the bill and you don't even have to go testify that's valuable. You can also submit written materials and not show up in person. We do that a lot when we're not present in a state.
So those are other options if you don't want to testify in person. And I would also say if you're really interested in getting involved in supporting state level work, sign up for action alerts but also work on building relationships with your local lawmakers. If you don't live near the capitol, that's perfectly fine. Every single state lawmaker has a district office in the district which they represent. So there's probably not that far from you and you can visit with them.
Find a time to get coffee depending on the size of your state with them or their staff people and build a relationship. Talk about the work that you or your chapter is doing, what issues that are important to you, become a useful resource to them and explain issues that you care about because they might not know they have non-religious constituents in their areas and they might not know what's important to them, but it shows that there's people out there that care about these things and that we're watching what they do and that we care about the actions that we're taking. So even if they're hostile building, building that sort of relationship can be really valuable.
Rebecca Markert:
I also just like to tell people, because I've participated in a lot of different lobby days on the federal and state level and I can't tell you how many times I've worked with people who said, this is the first time I've ever done anything like this. And they're very nervous going into that room, whether it's just meeting one-on-one or meeting with a group of constituents with the legislator or testifying at a committee hearing. But every single time people walk away from that experience saying, that was awesome, that was great. It felt empowering and it wasn't as scary as I thought it was when I was going into that room.
So yeah, you really just sort of have to get over that hurdle of feeling like it's, it's too much. And remember what Alison said earlier, that they're just people and oftentimes you know the issue, you know your story better than anybody else. And so once you do it and get over that first time nervousness, you're going to find that it was really an empowering, amazing experience and you'll be like me and asking other people to come and join you for lobby days on all issues that you care about.
Alison Gill:
Well let's move on to predictions for 2023. All right, so I'll focus on church state stuff first. We spoke last time we were talking about state legislation about how the Supreme Court has such a big influence on what states do and I think that's gonna be very true for the coming year as well. There were several major cases this year including Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Carson v. Makin, Kennedy v. Bremerton, and even some like the, this isn't directly related to our area but the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which involves the second amendment and gun control is a huge case as well.
So there's just so much going on that could affect relevant issues in other other related issues that we're gonna see in states. And even if a court doesn't make like a direct ruling on something, often you see state lawmakers trying to push an agenda will often point to something the Supreme Court did and say well the court's requiring this or the court this means that we have to pass this law or we can't pass this law that that happens all the time. And they just sort of say that something is the case.
This happened a lot where they tried to say that churches had to be exempted from public health safety laws like public health orders around, you know, when there's emergencies. So basically they saw the Tandon decision at the Supreme Court and said, well that means that everybody has to be exempted, which is not what the decision says no, but that never let them stop them before. So I wanna highlight three major areas when it comes to what we might see that is directly involving church state and there's like a whole bunch of other like enumerable other things we could talk about.
But three areas, one is school prayer and after Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, which we talked about many times so far on this podcast, it'll be much more difficult, unfortunately to challenge the intrusion of religion into schools. In essence, it eliminated the previous test used to determine when there's been a violation of the Establishment Clause and replaced it with a new test that's really uncertain and vague and lawmakers in various states pushed by Christian nationalists are likely to see what they can try to get away with. So we might just see all new bills that say, okay well this means that we can have prayer in school now. Right? That's how they might portray it.
Monica Miller:
Exactly the spinning, it's the spinning that we talked about earlier. Our opponents are kind of slimy, they take something and they either exaggerate it or they just completely flip it on its head.
Alison Gill:
Right. And it's not like other lawmakers are gonna go read the case to figure out what it said and didn't say. Right, exactly. And so they might try to allow, for example, teachers to pray with students or protect them when they call- cross the line and engage in coercion or like set up a defense fund for teachers or there's so many different things they could do.
Another way this might come up, we've already started seeing this unfortunately, is legislation to allow teachers to express their religious beliefs in the classroom in the context of misgendering or dead naming trans students. Because you know, Kennedy case was about both religious expression but also about employee speech, you know, so that–
Monica Miller:
Doubly protected.
Alison Gill:
Yeah, doubly protected. Oh that's the worst. Anyway, so yeah, that's another area where this could come up but like direct intrusion or influencing against students this way. And even beyond the legislative context, I think we're just gonna see a wave of religious activists trying to push more and more religion into school. I mean, let me ask you Rebecca and Liz, your folks handle more of these cases than anybody I know. Have we already seen that?
Rebecca Markert:
Oh absolutely. I think that for years now we've seen school administrators and teachers and other faculty who are hellbent on indoctrinating students becoming more emboldened and Kennedy really only reinforced their beliefs that they have the right to do this and indoctrinate young children. So we've seen some pretty egregious cases over the last couple of months once schools came back into session where teachers have prayer walls and they're making students go to religious assemblies. So we're definitely seeing that.
Liz Cavell:
There's just a sense of like we can do this now Alison you mentioned earlier, and I kind of wanted to expound on this, the notion of state legislators are in their minds, they're responding to whatever the Supreme Court recently did with state legislation. But again, sometimes they are not very thoughtful and studious people and sometimes they're just jackasses and they don't necessarily pour over these Supreme Court decisions and try to figure out the nuanced, you know, changes in constitutional law that are being announced. They're just literally responding to the social media scroll version of whatever they heard happened.
So it's like Kennedy is a big old showboat Christian 50 yard line prayer guy, he won ergo we can do this now kind of thing. Like that is the level of synthesis that's happening. And then these bills are getting written and like Rebecca's talking about, we're seeing this on the microcosm level, the classroom level, we're seeing teachers themselves, I mean you would expect state legislators to be up to a little bit higher standard in terms of responding to what the Supreme Court did.
But I think sometimes you see bills that are just like, okay the Supreme Court is favorable to this now and so we're just gonna push our bill. That's like the put prayer back in schools act. And it's just this very superficial understanding of what the Supreme Court is saying. But I mean it's not wrong in the sense that what they see is a Supreme Court that is extremely favorable to these views and these policy positions and responding to that to the Nth degree. You know, they're not just responding to the specific cases that were decided.
Alison Gill:
That's right. The second item I wanted to go into was school vouchers. And so after the Carson v. Makin decision, you know, public schools have been a huge target of the religious right, right. For a very long time. And school vouchers or tax credits, which are just an alternative way of managing school vouchers, really are efforts to sort of divest public schools of their income, of their money, their funding streams and shift it to private religious schools.
And after Carson v. Makin, which was the Maine case, uh, we talked about earlier this year you know there's, I don't think that's gonna have a drastic impact frankly because there's already a lot of vouchers out there. It only affects a few states that have Carson-like programs, but there has been a steady drumbeat of more and more states trying to push these and that we might see expansions, especially in states that already have vouchers. I think Florida, for example, passes a voucher bill every year as far as <laugh> as far as I know. So I think that's a good example.
Liz Cavell:
Well I would say too, and this is like adjacent to vouchers, but responsive to what the court signaled in Carson v. Makin is what we might see in 2023 is states like Maine that want to protect their public school resources or their public money, you know, what they were trying to accomplish with their system in Maine that the court said violates the free exercise rights of these individual parents and schools.
We don't want our public money going to schools that discriminate on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. We don't want our public money going to schools that don't have to comply with the ADA and all of these other pub policies that we try to put forth in our public schools.
Are we gonna see states like Maine try to strengthen their state law in terms of, okay, well we have to allow religious participation in some of these funding schemes, but we're gonna be more explicit in what's required of religious organizations and schools that are trying to take this public money or share in this public resource.
And then what's the response gonna be to that by litigants and by the Supreme Court? So I do think the saga is not over with vouchers, public school money and even in states that have a more direct funding approach like the state of Maine, this is gonna be a lot of call and response between state legislatures and the Supreme Court as time goes on.
Alison Gill:
You're absolutely right. I mean that Maine did pass a law that prevents discrimination and it's very likely eventually to be challenged and you know, and of course there's been challenges to non-discrimination laws for years. So is this the next avenue by which they can challenge non-discrimination laws? And I know we're gonna talk about the 303 Creative case soon, so that's gonna be coming up. But I mean that's, that that hits upon the same issue as well. So this is all happening in real time.
And the third area is denial of care. So over the last few years we've seen an increasing trend of bills that allow for very broad denial of care proposed in various different states. So basically hospitals and health centers can refuse to provide certain types of care based on their purported religious beliefs. And these bills already passed in Arkansas and Ohio and this past year they also passed in South Carolina, Mississippi had a prior existing one.
But this is different from other types of denial of care bills which focused more on saying hospitals and doctors wouldn't have to provide like abortion for example cuz these apply much more broadly to any health service, any health service whatsoever. And they also apply to not just religious but moral or ethical opposition or objections, they apply also to payers. So that means insurance companies and in some cases if you're self-insured employers, so your boss could say, well we don't provide this type of coverage for this type of care. We think you got cancer cuz you smoked too much and we don't approve of that and therefore we're not gonna cover your cancer. Sorry.
Or we don't think, we don't cover pregnancy out of uh, if you're not married because we're trying to cut back on having parental relief or whatever it might be. You know, we could see all sorts of abuses like that. And many also contain an explicit expansion of the ministerial exemption, which I'm not sure we've talked about before. But basically it gives immunity from labor laws and employment non-discrimination laws. So it gives religious hospitals a lot more flexibility to sort of ignore labor and non-discrimination laws. Yeah. So these are incredibly broad and dangerous and I'm really worried we're gonna see these in a few states like Texas and Florida.
Monica Miller:
One thing to note with the ministerial exception is that the losers in those cases tend to be religious employees, like Catholic school employees or people you know that work for a religious employer. They could be atheist, they could be Jewish, but oftentimes they're just Christian and have cancer. Like was the case of a teacher who had breast cancer and was terminated and sued under the ADA and then they were claiming we're a church and we can we get to discriminate against you cuz it's part of this ministerial exception and the court basically agreed with them.
And so I think that when we think broadly about like who's affected by this legislation, you know, that they're pushing for, it's not just these Christians against atheists, it's Christians against humans and people kind of at large, the good guys, the exemptions that they're pushing for are not just to privilege Christianity, it's to privilege their brand of Christianity.
Liz Cavell:
Right. Monica, just to put a finer point on what you're saying, it's like the ministerial exemption, what we're talking about, and you're right Alison, I don't know if we've gone super in depth on this, but what the ministerial exemption is in a nutshell is just religious employers basically by classifying all of their employees as ministers.
That is a way in which the court has said they can just strip away all of the other normal employment laws that would protect their employees. If you're a minister, then the law is not gonna come in and fetter how you treat your ministers in terms of their employment. And the con is that the court says, well it's fine if a religion wants to say our janitors are ministers and our teachers are ministers and all these people are ministers, then guess what? The ministerial exemption applies and we're not gonna make them adhere to all these labor and employment laws that everyone else who's an employer of human beings has to abide by.
And Monica's right. This is not like something that redounds to atheists and non-religious people, it's just another case of religious actors being above the law, religious employers not having to follow all the same rules as everyone else in the employer space. And the people who are hurt are their own employees. People that want to work for and support the mission of these religious organizations. And they're being discriminated against or fired in a lot of times for unlawful reasons, but they have no protection under the law because their employers are special.
Alison Gill:
The ministerial exemption has mostly been seen by courts in the context of schools. So these bills are explicitly expanding it to hospital entities and healthcare centers and hospitals, but also the bills show just how hypocritical it is because they go on and on and talk about the conscience rights of doctors and nurses and people like that and their ability to not provide certain types of medical care. These are often called medical conscience bill that's often the title is Medical Conscience bills, right? And then as soon as they get to a religious hospital they say, okay, well these doctors and nurses, they have no right at all.
They have no conscious privileges or protections whatsoever. Only the hospital does. So it's a conflict of personal religious beliefs versus institutional religious beliefs. And they're just coming out in favor of the institutional ones over the personal ones, which I would say are most strongly protected by the Constitution. Every time. Those are the three main issues I wanted to talk about. But I feel like we also have to add in, you know, these are not strictly state church issues, but there are some other really important areas we're gonna see a ton of legislation next year. And I think the most critical one to talk about is reproductive access.
Liz Cavell:
Obviously, the huge thing that most state legislatures are gonna feel the need to respond to from last year is the Dobbs decision and how that state legislature wants to go forward with reproductive access. So I think we're gonna, depending on which state legislature, you're gonna see bills introduced in both directions. So states that now have a green light to pass total bans of abortion or early bans, six week bans and heartbeat bills, and all these things that have been passed in order to challenge Roe over the years are now going to be introduced and probably passed in a lot of state legislatures.
Now that that anti-climax has happened, there's gonna be bills introduced to push the envelope further. So bans on interstate travel or telemedicine or other means of obtaining abortion if you now live in one of the states where abortion is effectively illegal or inaccessible and that is uncharted territory in terms of how challenges will be handled in the courts to bills like that, I think we're gonna now see expanded criminal penalties for women and providers.
You're gonna see bills that are attempting to narrow and shrink exceptions and expand and test out criminal penalties for people who provide abortions or for women who obtain abortions. And that's been signaled by plenty of politicians and legislators. Maybe we're gonna see expanded bills. I don't I haven't been necessarily tracking whether any of this is pre-filed, but it seems like expanding the, sort of the principle of Roe no longer being the law of the land and there no longer being any privacy protections. Maybe we'll see states start to ban contraception, ban emergency contraception, ban IVF, or do other types of restrictions around reproductive health options.
Alison Gill:
I don't even think they have to go that far as to go down the line of the other cases like Griswold that deal with contraception. I think we might just see states saying, oh, actually this type of contraception is an abortifacient or whatever, and therefore it's actually abortion. I mean, nothing stops them in sort of reinventing reality when they legislate unfortunately, or like in vitro fertilization. Right. IVF, I could see them saying, well that ultimately results in at least some abortions because some eggs are not implanted and therefore, I mean there's all sorts of dumb arguments that are not logical, but they could sort of make, you know what I mean?
And so we might see those, those come up as well. I mean they could also see personhood bills, which are just the most absurd to me. So a personhood bill basically means, you know, declaring that a fetus is a person, which therefore if you, I don't know, have a miscarriage, you might have committed murder, especially if there's drug use involved. So, or I don't know, I guess it was, ends up with all these ridiculously weird results. Like yeah, can you drive in an HOV lane if you're pregnant
Monica Miller:
Right. Oh my God. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Liz Cavell:
It's so bonkers because a personhood bill is just something that redefines a fetus at some point and in the bonkers of the bonkers places that would be conception as a person and then just kind like throws that like a grenade into the rest of the state code. You know what I mean? So it's like in any law that implicates a person, I guess that law then also protects or binds or involves fetuses. It's absolute utter chaos. But we've seen these bills in the pre-roe world as message bills, but now who knows?
Alison Gill:
I wonder if you can claim one as a dependent tax break. Um, anyway.
Monica Miller:
Yeah. No, and I'm over here struggling to get an elephant, like the basic right to live free and all the scientists and everyone agree this, you know, for my other job, but Non-Human Rights Project and it's like, yeah, when you start seeing these personhood bills pop up for, for like clumps of cells and think of the implications for women, it's just like this world is so upside down.
Liz Cavell:
Yeah. Also proactive bills, right? I, I said for the good or for the bad bad, but we might see some good bills protecting and establishing a right to access reproductive care funding for abortion or for other reproductive care and to help cover out-of-state patients. Cuz of course there's gonna be crazy imbalances. There already are. We're seeing the fallout from Dobbs as huge imbalances in terms of where reproductive care is happening, sanctuary laws, bills being filed and passed to protect providers and patients in certain sanctuary states that want to make sure that nobody can be prosecuted for accessing care in their state.
Alison Gill:
It's especially important for doctors sometimes, right? Because there's often reciprocity between states. Like if a doctor gets disciplined in one state, another state might have reciprocity and those go across regions sometimes, or what if they provide telemedicine in a state? And there's all sorts of reasons why protecting licenses for doctors make sense. Some of these are very untested though, like you said earlier, and it's hard to know what's gonna stand up and what's not. We're in this new era of law.
Liz Cavell:
So I was just thinking that it's like a brave new world of how can states legislate to, to protect within their own borders. Reproductive access and the people who both want to come there to provide that care and to access that care.
I mean, this is never, we have not had to deal with this reality in terms of like legislative tools for creating sanctuary states for reproductive access. I mean, we'll just see how this all, it's gonna be just chaos. It's gonna be a minefield. Anyway, so that's all I wanted to say about reproductive access, but I think we have some other areas of bills that are not state church that are going to be explosive in 2023.
Alison Gill:
Let me talk about anti-trans bills because we're already seeing like a huge amount pre-filed. Like I mentioned this, we saw just a wave of anti-trans bills this past year, over the last several years actually. It's just been increasing and getting worse. Like before, we only see a few bills that call trans medical care for young people. And I wanna just be really explicit. We're talking about trans medical care for young people. We're not talking about surgery, we're only talking about, for example sometimes a vast minority of of trans young people might get puberty suppression when they're teenagers and then go on sex-based hormones or cross-sex hormones when they're older.
But for the most part we're talking about very limited and reversible medical inter- interventions. So just to be really clear about that. But some of these bans are just, they're just imagining this whole other world where like thousands of children are being put on hormones at age three because they once wore a pink by accident or whatever. It's just like, like it's crazy. The sort of framework they're creating and now they're calling it child abuse.
Before they were just saying, okay, well you know, doctors shouldn't do this and now, now it's being labeled as child abuse, which means it could like re end up removal of children from parents' homes, from their homes and like put into the foster care system, which is terrible, especially for the trans youth that are having to deal with these issues. It's just getting worse and worse unfortunately and more and more vindictive and cruel and it's very worrisome. We're just already seeing just so many negative introduced bills this year for next year.
Liz Cavell:
Well I'm just curious, what do we think is motivating these bills in terms of just like what's popular and what your constituents want and what's poll tested and right? It felt like a lot of the election kind of red meat fear mongering stuff was being prioritized in terms of like why we saw so much rhetoric and legislative activity around anti-trans issues. But why are we seeing it in 2023? You know what I mean? Like why is this a priority?
Rebecca Markert:
I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The Supreme Court has an impact on what state legislatures do. And a couple of years ago we had the Bostock decision, which protected a lot of LGBTQIA rights. And now we are seeing the pushback on that. And it does take a couple of years for bills to get introduced and go through the process and things like that. I think that, that's the backlash that we're seeing. But Alison, I think you also have thoughts on this.
Alison Gill:
Yeah. I'm not gonna say that's not a cause cuz I think it is a cause like marriage equality has broad popular support now and like the right has lost on that issue. So they're trying to identify a new vulnerable target, drive wedges in the LGBTQ coalitions and make progress and things like the Don't Say Gay bill quickly, that became about sexual orientation too, right?
And so they're using that as a way to make progress by targeting vulnerable minority, but it's also just rising fascism, quite honestly. Like they're targeting a minority without much political power that most people do not know, that are not well understood and that are able to sort of spread myths about with an impunity targeting them for separation from society, like trying to drive them underground, fostering violence, all sorts of activities.
I mean, it's classic scapegoating of a minority for political gain and you know, we've seen where this goes before and it's nowhere pleasant, right? So this is increasingly worrisome and I think that that is the driving force here. If like politicians think they're gonna get political gain and influencers think that it's going to be popular for them to keep demonizing this tiny group of people that most people don't know anything about and it's gonna get them political gain.
We're just gonna see more and more of it, unfortunately, and we'll start seeing worse outcomes. I mean, people being driven outta states and children being removed from their homes is already really bad. It could get a lot worse. And I'm, I'm, I don't know, I joke that I just renewed my passport, but I did. So I mean, it's very worrisome. It is very worrisome.
Rebecca Markert:
I'm glad that you started this segment out by clarifying what the care actually is because I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people recently who believe that when you are offering care to trans people, that means you are giving them surgery at 10 and 12 years old and they do not understand what it means. And they are horrified to hear that you would go and change the anatomy of somebody who's still growing. So I think it's really important to explain what it is and what it is not.
Alison Gill:
Yeah. And in most cases, we're talking about young children, it might be that they dress differently or use a different name. A and usually, you know, parents bring their children who are, you know, gender nonconforming and gender dysphoric to doctors because there's a lot of distress. Like, it's very, very obvious there's something going on there, right? Because if it's not, you wouldn't normally bring like a young child to a doctor on these issues, right?
So it's pretty significant, right? So in those cases, that's all it involves until the young person maybe starts to go through the beginning stages of puberty and then they might do puberty suppression, which is reversible. And then, you know, when the child is older, they might go on hormones. That's what medical interventions actually look like.
Liz Cavell:
It also pisses me off as a parent, if I am seeking out this type of care for my child, then the best thing possible is being done for my child. Like you do not care more about my child than me. So stop. There's no need for you to legislate around like how I can care best for my child or myself. It's the same thing in the anti-abortion space. It's like I am probably the best person to decide whether or not I should continue being pregnant and also what is gonna happen with my kid or what my kid needs.
Rebecca Markert:
Well, we just want to remind you that we are going to put some resources in the show notes that include links to sign up for our legislative action alerts and to get involved, involved in our organizations, you'll be able to track both positive and negative bills introduced in your state through legislative trackers provided by American Atheists.
And please, if we are not tracking any bills that you think we should be please flag that for us. So that's it for today's episode. Again, it is our December episode, so happy holidays to all and thank you to these wonderful co-hosts. We're ending our first year of this show. And for a lot of people, you don't realize that this all started back in January of 2022. So when we turn into the new year, we have been at this for a year now, so yay us.
Monica Miller:
Yay us.
Rebecca Markert:
So that's it for today's episode. I'm Rebecca Markert.
Monica Miller:
And I'm Monica Miller.
Rebecca Markert:
I'm Alison Gill.
Liz Cavell:
And I'm Liz Cavell. Please follow us on Twitter and on Facebook and you can find out more about the podcast online we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
Rebecca Markert:
We Dissent is a Joint production of the Freedom From Religion, Foundation American Atheists, and the American Humanist Association. It is hosted by attorneys Liz Cavell, Alison Gill, Monica Miller, and me, Rebecca Markert. Special thanks to FFRF legal fellow Sammy Lawrence, who assisted with producing this episode. Other production support comes from Greta Martens, audio engineering provided by Audio for the Arts based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Thanks for listening.
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