Liz and Rebecca take a break from the regular schedule to answer listener questions. They talk about how the founders viewed state/church separation, the issues our movement should focus on, and how to engage women in the cause of secularism.
Resources
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 the Separation of Church.
Liz Cavell: And I’m Liz Cavell with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Rebecca Markert: So if we didn’t already wish you a Happy New Year listeners, we want to wish you a happy New Year. I’m not sure if we did that in our last episode.
Liz Cavell: I don’t think we were very happy.
Rebecca Markert: So today we’re going to take a break in covering legal issues of the day to answer your questions. This is going to be our annual mailbag episode and Liz and I thought we should take a moment at the top of the show to explain our recording schedule and also our decision to have a mailbag episode right now. We are a podcast that plans out our episodes months in advance. This episode, as we mentioned, is our mailbag episode, and we originally planned to record this in December of last year and then drop it in January, so it would be our New Year’s episode. But then the Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments in the Skrmetti case and we had to shift our plans for episodes because we really wanted to debrief that case and give you our impressions of the oral arguments. So that pushed this episode then to a February drop date, and we’re actually recording this just a few days after Trump was inaugurated and the new administration has been in place. So we are seeing many of the policies and the ideas from Project 2025 that we’ve been worried about and that we’ve been covering over previous episodes. We’re starting to see those be implemented and many of the Christian nationalists that we discussed during our post-election episode have been appointed and some of them have been confirmed and others are well on their way to being confirmed by the Senate. And so we really just wanted to acknowledge that this episode may seem out of place given the state of affairs in our country right now.
But this is really just sort of the way our schedule shook out. We are certainly going to be discussing more about the new administration and the attacks on the separation of church and state in future episodes. And we’re actually going to be devoting at least two episodes to two cases that were recently granted review by the Supreme Court that also touch on religious liberty issues. We know that the threats that we are facing are big and at top of mind for everybody, and we’re going to be discussing them this year. But today we are going to go with our normal recording schedule and go forward with our mailbag episode. We’re actually really excited to answer the questions that you have asked us and to talk about the issues that you have wanted to talk about and explore what you are interested in.
Liz Cavell: That’s right, thanks Rebecca. Important to acknowledge that a lot of very frightening and troubling things are taking place over these first couple months of the year. And of course so many of them will be a threat to secularism in all of the civil rights issues that we know you all care about so much and we will continue to cover. So our mail episode is both a chance to pause and answer listener questions and also a break in our recording schedule to give us a chance to regroup for the year ahead and plan some really in depth and important episodes and things to cover in 2025. So stay tuned for the year ahead. We’ll be covering all the terrifying threats and the Project 2025 implementation that is happening. We’re watching very closely. Of course we’re working very diligently in our organizations on opposing so many of the things that are already starting to happen, but for now, we’ve invited the audience to submit questions through socials or our website and we’re going to give our best answers to some of those issues that are on your minds. So thanks for sticking with us and let’s jump in.
Rebecca Markert: That’s right. Let’s jump into our first question. This one is a little bit of a long one, so I’m going to read it. This question came through Instagram, the listener says "I was reading something and it really seemed like separation of church and state was initially intended to imply and ensure the state should not interfere with the church versus now when we talk about it, it’s typically seen as the other way around. The church should not interfere with the state. Does the exact wording lead to more of what I would say a two-way street, even though maybe it was intended just as one way? Is there any history on this?"
Liz Cavell: I think this is a really important question both because obviously a supporter of state church separation, but this person somehow has come across some information that is telling them, originally our founders intended for the Establishment Clause and the concept of separation of church and state only to be a one-way proposition, meaning the government needs to stay out of the church and not interfere with the church, but not the other way around. So we relish the opportunity to correct the record here because I do think it’s really important that both things are true. Our constitutional principles that the founders laid down that do take on new meaning as our society and our culture change and progress in a lot of ways. And it is meant to be a document that can adapt somewhat to the changing realities of the nation. But it’s also true that the founders very much intended the separation of church and state to be a two-way street, so to speak.
The founders wrote a lot, especially Madison and Jefferson, about why they were actively choosing to have a secular government even when many of the colonists themselves, as this person alludes to, and many of the colonial governments themselves were not secular. Some of the colonists themselves, they were fleeing from persecution. But when they came to the colonies, they were very much ready to enact their own system of persecution and their own dominant theocracy within the colonies. But when it came time to sit down and create the United States of America, the founders surveyed the colonial landscape and actively chose to embrace secularism and a separation between state and church and vice versa for its government. And that was a truly original concept in government, but was seen as something that had been a failure of so many prior civilizations and governments.
Rebecca Markert: When you are talking about what the colonies looked like, I’m always reminded to tell the story about Rhode Island because, not because I’m from Rhode Island, but I did go to law school there and it has a special place in my heart. But the whole state of Rhode Island was created because someone was banned for religious reasons. Roger Williams was actually banned from the Massachusetts colony because he was not religious enough for them. And I always like to talk about that when we’re talking about what it looked like and the reality that our founders had when they were coming up with our governing documents, really understanding what it looked like not only over in the quote old world, but what the colonies looked like and how religion was really one and the same with government and how it really needed to be separate.
Liz Cavell: And the idea was very, that government should not interfere at all with religion and churches and that they should be separate for the good of the church. But our founders very much also understood the Establishment Clause as prohibiting religious interference with the government and a true separation between the two. And I think it’s notable that many of the colonies did not have that model because it kind of makes all the more striking that our founders chose. They looked around, they saw in many modern examples or modern to them examples of religious influence over what was still democratic government, but they were choosing a different path and they were going to reject those models in favor of a truly secular government, a two way street of secularism.
Rebecca Markert: Do you want to talk a little bit about why a two-way street is beneficial?
Liz Cavell: Yeah, I think what our founders understood and what I think has really been born out by the history of our nation is that, and I don’t know my founders quotations, so I’ll just like —
Rebecca Markert: Generalities is fine.
Liz Cavell: We know some of the things that we know our founders said or discussed had to do with the idea that both religion and government will be stronger and sort of more pure and less corrupted if they operate separately. And I think that has been borne out by the history of many civilizations and religions and has been true in the United States. And I think also our founders and the history of our nation has sort of borne this out, which is recognizing the United States of America as pluralistic and a place where unlike anywhere else in the old world, this would be a place where pluralism was a national value and keeping religion and government separate and keeping both government free from religious influence and vice versa is what makes pluralism possible and true religious freedom possible because obviously you can’t have true religious freedom and equality amongst all these different religions and people of no religion, which by the way existed at the time of the founders during the enlightenment.
You can’t have that equality and that freedom without a government that is actually neutral and secular and doesn’t take sides on questions of religion because there’s no way to keep that corrupting influence out without strict separation. Eventually you would have a system where certain religions are first class and everyone else is second or some version of the same. And so I think it’s been borne out by our history, but also was the intention of our founders, that pluralism and true religious freedom can really only be realized if our government is completely neutral.
Rebecca Markert: And that set up then also boils over into other freedoms that we hold dear. We talk about this at length on our podcast, but it then helps bolster the freedoms of all of the other civil rights areas that we care about as well.
Liz Cavell: It’s true because I do think it’s important to see– acknowledge, I think our founders truly understood and their writings and debates about the Establishment Clause and the Bill of Rights and even just the constitutional convention shows sort of an understanding, a value for all of the freedoms that were embodied in what came to be our first amendment, which is the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to petition your government for grievances. These things we know were extremely important to the founders. It’s the whole way our country came to be free and independent. And I think the Establishment Clause is bundled with those other rights in the First Amendment, not unintentionally because it’s seen as an integral part of this broader important value, which is the freedom of conscience, the freedom of thought, the freedom to believe and think and hold your values however you see fit and that can’t be interfered with by the government and secularism, that two-way street is an integral part of that broader freedom of conscience that was important to the founders.
Rebecca Markert: So the next question I’m really excited about because I’m always interested in the answer to this question. The question is, "what does the teaching of church state separation look like in law schools today? Do bar exams cover it? Which law schools are known for delving into the subject?" And I love this question because it is something that when I’m doing interviews with recent law grads or interviews with potential interns, I do ask because I obviously went to law school a long time ago.
Liz Cavell: Same, same.
Rebecca Markert: It’s been like 20 years, but it really is not taught. The Establishment Clause is not widely taught in law schools. And wasn’t 20 years ago when I went to law school and I checked in with my staff at Americans United to see what it looks like from some of our recent grads, and it still seems pretty much the same even after the tumultuous years that the Establishment Clause has had over the last five years or so at the Supreme Court. It’s not a topic that is readily taught, unfortunately. Many law schools do require constitutional law, but it varies from law school to law school. My law school required us to take a full year, the first semester was National Powers, learning about how the constitution set up our branches of government, and then the second semester was focused on individual liberties like all of the freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, things like that. So our law school class did cover the Establishment Clause, but for a week or two.
Liz Cavell: Right, again, it’s often covered if at all, only in the context of constitutional law, which is a course name that encompasses, like Rebecca said, the entire constitution, which is every one of the Bill of Rights. So the Establishment Clause as I just mentioned, being one clause of one amendment to the entire Constitution. And so that course has to cover often, like Rebecca said, the entire structure and setup of the government, not the Bill of Rights, but all of the articles that set up our government and how it works and all of the amendments to the constitution, many of which are very significant and have a significant history such as say the 14th Amendment and others, and then just all the clauses that are not part of the Bill of Rights, but that teach us how different branches derive the power to do different things. And so there’s just a lot to cover in constitutional law. And so the Establishment Clause, even though it represents this whole body of law in this really important legal landscape that affects everyone, doesn’t really end up getting much of its own devoted attention in law school. Like many things.
Rebecca Markert: Like many things.
Liz Cavell: Yeah.
Rebecca Markert: I also found that many students would tell me that if they were doing anything about religion, it was an elective class that they took much later in law school. Some of the constitutional law classes at other schools, you might have only done it for one semester where it was required and then you could take an elective on free speech or first amendment issues that generally focused on free speech issues. But our particular issue area, not one that is readily available in terms of the bar exam, it is an area that’s required for you to know because it could be tested, but I don’t think it’s ever really been tested.
Liz Cavell: I mean, I took two bar exams and I don’t remember being tested on specifically the Establishment Clause.
Rebecca Markert: I took one and one of our fellows at AU told us that there might have been something on the multiple choice part of the exam, but it seems very rare as well. That said, obviously, I think there is growing interest in religious liberty cases and I think there are probably going to be courses at various law schools that will be taught on, not just the Establishment Clause, but obviously the elevation of free exercise clause around the country. I think those classes are going to be something that will be popping up in law schools around the country. We are also aware of First Amendment clinics that are popping up at law schools around the country, and a lot of those are focusing on mostly free exercise rights because free exercise claims are growing in popularity, for lack of a better word. But those are the types of cases that we’re really seeing at the appellate and Supreme Court levels. We probably will see a shift in how these clauses are taught given the landscape, but most of the attorneys from the last 20 years have not been learning that in school. It’s something that they learn. We both learned on the job.
Liz Cavell: And in fairness, I think that describes a great many niche areas.
Rebecca Markert: Very true
Liz Cavell: Both constitutional law and just every area of law. Law school is definitely not a very nuts and bolts learning experience. But yeah, it’s definitely a niche.
So let’s take this next question, Rebecca. I think it’s really, really important, especially now more than ever, but I think it’s something both of us spend a lot of our time on. So "how do we reclaim the importance of a secular democratic public education?"
Well, I think implicit in this question and sort of for us to acknowledge is that we are seeing and facing growing and greater attacks on public education in this country. A huge, huge priority of the Project 2025 movement is to undermine public education to advance and privatize, to advance public funding to private schools and further privatize education in this country and to do that in a variety of ways that we’ve been fighting against for years. But obviously that movement has gotten a huge boost by the recent elections. So it’s a real live issue right now, and I think reclaiming it is probably the right framework in terms of thinking about where we are right now in the fight
Rebecca Markert: In terms of how do we reclaim it. I think we are very thoughtful at both of our organizations about taking lawsuits that are going to be educating the public on these policy goals and aims of Project 2025. We have taken cases together that are fighting against a religious charter school in Oklahoma, and that lawsuit has generated a lot of conversation and discussions in the state about what it means to have a secular public school and really has brought to mind what parents don’t want taught for their children. And I’m lost if you want to just jump in here. Yeah.
Liz Cavell: So one thing that I want to point out as we’re kind of thinking through this question is, and we talked about this in the election postmortem episode, one thing that’s encouraging is that the education privatization movement has gained a major stronghold in terms of government power. It’s not popular. And we talked about this in our prior episode. We saw when these public education undermining issues were on the ballot, they were roundly rejected by people in ballot referenda, so meaning in the states that had on their ballot for the voters to vote straight up, yes or no, do you want this? The expansion of school vouchers, which is public money going to private and mostly religious schools, those were rejected by voters everywhere that they were on the ballot. So people, majorities of the voting, public support, public education, they don’t want their tax dollars going to private and mostly religious schools and they don’t see privatization as the answer to our crisis in public education.
So what I think is really important in this moment is for organizations like ours, but also coalition partners that work directly on supporting public education and teachers and all of those things, is to really just press and lean in on what we already know the public is reacting to, which is pushback against some of these efforts to privatize education, to take money out of people’s public schools. People know that our public schools are community institutions, that we need to support our communities to keep our children healthy and safe and to keep our democracy and our citizenry thriving. They don’t want public schools to go away or to have less funding. And so we need to view this area as strong for us to really step on the gas in this area and really pushing on this issue because it’s one where not only is it a super important value to our movement, but it’s popular and the public agrees with us. And so those two things to me mean that this is where we should be spending most of our time in these next few years.
Rebecca Markert: And this discussion sort of dovetails into the next question, which I think is largely the same answer. "What is our strongest secular issue? What issue could unite the most people and where do we stand the best chances of legal victories?" And I would say again, public education for all the reasons that Liz and I just discussed, it is one of the strongest areas of law for the separation of church and state that still exists after the Roberts Court has taken a hammer at the wall of separation. And I think it is one that really does, like Liz mentioned, unite the most people because it has such strong support nationwide.
Liz Cavell: And it’s not a 50/50 proposition. Go back and listen to our post-election episode for the specific states and the specific margins, but we’re seeing big voting margins to support public education, to keep tax dollars out of the pockets of private and religious schools and to just generally support secular public education everywhere that citizens have an opportunity to directly on the ballot. So yes, it’s uniting and yes, it’s a strong secular issue because when we’re talking about strict separation between church and state and keeping religious indoctrination out of government action, the public school is the pretty much most coercive government apparatus maybe besides jails and prisons that really exists. And so where the Establishment Clause law has been weakened by a pretty hostile Supreme Court, we still have our strongest legal arguments in the context of public schools where the environment and the government action is so coercive. So this is where I think our organizations have stand the best chances of legal victories and also in public opinion and kind of uniting the public around our issues that we care about.
Rebecca Markert: And I probably say this until I’m blue in the face, but it is the issue area that we receive the most complaints about on an annual basis for both of our organizations by far.
Liz Cavell: And I mean I think that belies what I just said, which is that these are the places where the government’s action is most coercive. It most affects the citizenry. I mean the government institution that most of us have the most contact with in our regular lives is our kids’ public schools and our own public schools. I mean, what other government institutions do we interact with in anywhere near as often and as intimately as our public schools? And so that’s both a reason why we should keep them accountable and secular and also a reason why we should support them and fund them and make sure that they are strong and vibrant and not undermined by privatization efforts and the efforts of religious schools to take public money out of people’s pockets.
Rebecca Markert: Our next line of questions focus all on really just being a woman today. These might fold into each other, but the next question that we have is "what’s your biggest fear for today’s girls?" And–
Liz Cavell: This is a big one.
Rebecca Markert: This is a big one and is one that’s really highly emotional for me because I am the mother of a daughter and have nieces, and I think I mentioned this in our election episode. I mean, just knowing that they are growing up in a world where they have fewer rights than I did when I was growing up is horrific to me. And the fear that I have for them is that it’s not over. All of the strides that our mothers and our grandmothers had made for us have been rolled back, and I’m worried that it’s going to be worse for them. And that’s something that we never want for our children or our young relatives. We want to be able to leave them a world that is better than the one that we grew up in. And I really fear that no matter how hard we try, Liz and I, both lawyers devoted our lives to constitutional law and we’re in this fight and we are not going to give up. But I feel that at the end of the day, there might not be much progress that I see in my lifetime for her.
Liz Cavell: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard because there’s so much fear right now and just feels like so much regression and especially in this week that we’re recording this, right? We as a nation have withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, great, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, and we’re undoing all of these things that we needed to be making 10 times the progress on to leave our kids in a better place. And so there’s so much, but to speak to fears for today’s girls. I really do fear for… We already have the protections of Roe versus Wade gone, right? That’s not a constitutional right anymore for today’s girls, but what’s even scarier is that the vision laid out in 2025 for girls and women and the fact that there’s so much more that Christian nationalist movement wants to do to take rights and autonomy and independence away from women, and so much of it revolves around being able to control their reproductive lives.
I mean, how much freedom was gained for us by being able to control our reproductive lives because we have access to things like birth control pills and the morning after pill and mifepristone and misoprostol, and all of the things that exist to help women and girls control their futures and their lives by controlling their own reproductive destiny. Taking away Roe, like Rebecca said, was just the beginning and not the end. And when you read through Project 2025 and this vision, it lays out, it really is just this idea of taking girls back to the fifties and what the potential that held for them and read it for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. It’s in Project 2025, read the HHS section on family and family planning and family programs and services. It’s all over there. That is the vision for families and women and girls. And so part of that is taking away so many things that exist to bring women freedom over their own reproductive lives. And I fear for how much farther that project will go in the next four years and beyond.
Rebecca Markert: And not even just with reproductive health. I think just rights overall. I can spiral pretty fast, Liz. And I start thinking about how my mother, our mothers didn’t have the rights to get credit cards on their own to buy homes.
Liz Cavell: To divorce their husbands without cause.
Rebecca Markert: Right? All of that that were progresses, that were seen in my mother’s lifetime, and that could be also easily rolled back, and I’m now a single mom and bought my first home. And the fact that my daughter might not have that ability to control property that she owns, the money that she earns and the way that she wants to live her life at all is really disheartening and awful.
Liz Cavell: And this is not us just fear casting. This is what the people in charge, the authors of Project 2025 and many of their consiglieres, and these are people that are now in power. They’re being put into positions of power. They’re heading up agencies, they’re undersecretaries, they’re aides to the president. They have publicly laid out a vision for America and its quote families that involves women taking a subservient role. We have heard many of these proponents of Project 2025 call for an end to no-fault divorce that is explicitly a policy that is meant to take away rights of women to leave marriages. It was seen as a huge advancement in women’s freedom to leave abusive and controlling relationships. And so it is a scary time because all of a sudden these people have the power to put those policies into place, and it’s scary to think what that could do to the girls that are growing up right now.
Rebecca Markert: So then the next question that we have on this is "in many ways, mothers are central to social change. How can we entice moms to vote in their own self-interest and to resist conservative Christian traditions?" And I’d like to just revise that question a little bit and just talk about women overall and not just mothers.
Liz Cavell: Right? I think that’s so important because I think women in general move through the world in a way that is different and brings a really unique perspective to both public life and government. And so it’s hard to see and to know how many women are voting for Project 2025 to be in power in the last election. Rebecca and I are processing this, the rest of you in real time. God, what do we say?
Rebecca Markert: I think one of the ways that we change how they’re voting and how they view these changes as good or bad or however, how we get them to join the resistance so to speak, is really, again, back to education. I think it’s really important for them to understand what it really was like back then, understand the history of where we were and how we got to where we are now and tell those stories. A really powerful way to educate is by having women share what it was like for them when they didn’t have the right to own their own home or they didn’t have the right to dictate their own health choices. And really bringing to light what the human impact is is going to be one of the most impactful ways of bringing people to our side and getting them to vote in their self-interests.
That’s really, I know that feels like a very broad general statement, not giving a lot of nuts and bolts specifics, but I think that that is where we’re at right now is we really need to make this an issue that they see as a direct threat to their own livelihood. And sometimes the best way to do that is by having someone who’s close to them or somebody in their community who says, "Hey, this is happening to me." I think about all the stories that are coming out now of women who are not able to get abortion care that they need, and it’s affecting their ability to have wanted children in the future, or they’re bleeding out and dying, and that has a obviously long lasting impact on the people in their social circles and is going to sway. And as hard as it is to hear those stories, and as much as we don’t want to be a society that’s like, here’s all doom and gloom news. Everybody wants to hear a good happy story, those are important because we have to face the realities of what’s going on, and so do they in order to really resist these initiatives by Christian nationalists.
Liz Cavell: Right. This is a bigger question because obviously things have gotten so out of whack in our society in terms of national elections and what we as the voting public see as connected to candidates. That’s a bigger problem that has to do with information, how we as Americans get our information, whether we have good information, whether we have bad information, but it kind of goes back to the old school, the personal is political kind of thing. We need to find a way to, and this is the royal we, not just our organizations and not just Rebecca and I, but we as a culture need to find a way to draw a more direct line between consequences and what you experience personally and what your kids will experience and what will happen to their public schools and what will happen to their bodies and what they can get at Planned Parenthood and all of those things.
And who we’re voting for in elections, both at local, state and national levels. I don’t know if it’s social media or just the media environment that’s changed so much that that connection has been cut off and it’s become more of a national sport and less of a personal experience. And I mean, obviously I don’t have the answers for how to do that, but I think that’s the connection that’s missing, that must be missing for especially so many women. Seeing that personal connection between who we’re choosing as candidates and putting in those positions of power and how that actually will personally affect your life and the life of the people you care about.
Rebecca Markert: This just brought to mind a message that I saw from the executive director of the organization, Lawyers for Good Government, the executive director of that organization had posted on her social media something about politics being personal, and I just want to read it because everything that you just said, Liz really reminded me of it and I thought it was so well done and really sort of this call for people to wake up and realize what is at stake.
So she wrote, "I hope anyone who ever said, let’s not make this about politics, is starting to realize that politics is personal. Politics is about who lives and who dies, who is free, and who is in prison, who is poor, and who is wealthy. It’s not the only thing, but it touches everything. Life and politics are not two separate things, and if you think they are two separate things, it’s probably because they haven’t come for you or your loved ones yet. If that’s you, I beg you to expand your definition of loved ones to include more of your fellow humans."
Liz Cavell: Yeah, that about captures it.
Rebecca Markert: Yeah. So our next question kind of dials back a little bit from the heavy stuff going into sort of a little bit more fun discussion topics here, but "what caused you to specialize in this area of law?" And I know this story for you, Liz, but I’d love to hear it again. So tell us how did you end up at the Freedom From Religion Foundation?
Liz Cavell: I mean, a lot of things kind of serendipity as much as intentionality, but I started out as a deputy public defender in Southern Colorado. That was my first job out of law school. And after a couple of years of doing that, I was ready to leave and my spouse, Andrew Seidel, wanted to work in the secular movement. He got kind of interested in that while doing his LLM, and he happened to be doing some long distance volunteer work for Rebecca Markert, the legal director at the Freedom From Religion Foundation back then, one of three attorneys working there. They were ready to grow their legal staff, and they invited Andrew to come interview. We thought Madison, Wisconsin is a nice place to live, so we’ll move here. Andrew took a job here. We both took the bar, and during that time, one of the three other attorneys at FFRF took a job in the private sector, and I applied for her job at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
And I loved my work as a public defender and I couldn’t really hack it, the caseload and the emotional stress level, but it was a really good fit for what I wanted to do with my law degree. And when I thought about it and applied for the job at FFRF, it really kind of hit all those points. I just really enjoy and am fulfilled by representing a marginalized community that doesn’t have a lot of power and can’t really stand up for themselves against what is a very powerful government machinery. And so I like a job that sort of takes the government to task on behalf of marginalized people. And so it was a good fit, and I’ve been there ever since. That was 2013.
Rebecca Markert: Yeah, similarly, life just sort of happened. Originally when I went to law school, I was interested in doing more election work. I had experience on Capitol Hill and working with political campaigns, and I really liked the constitutional law aspect of election law, and I thought that’s really where I’m headed. During law school, I started doing criminal work and had some internships in the prosecutor space, but one thing that I really, really liked about that, again, criminal law in general, was just all of the constitutional law questions that were coming up. And so I started getting interested in that. I graduated in 2008, which you may remember, Liz was not the greatest time to graduate from law school.
Liz Cavell: It was not a good time for a job search.
Rebecca Markert: It’s not a good time for a job search. At the time, I was dating the man I eventually married, and we had decided we wanted to raise our family in Wisconsin when we had children. We wanted them to be from Wisconsin. A weird thing, but made a lot of sense to me. But anyway, so we decided to move to Madison, and I started looking for jobs. And because I had this background in working in DC and working sort of on national/federal issues, I really didn’t think that that would be something that I would be able to do in Madison.
But the Freedom From Religion Foundation is based here in Madison, and they just happened to post for their first ever staff attorney position. And so I applied for it and got it. One of the reasons that I stayed so long, because obviously I’ve devoted my entire legal career to this church state space. One of the reasons that I did stay in it and eventually then moved to Americans United is because I do really think that it is an issue that touches on all other civil rights that I care about. And that really became evident as I started doing this work and really seeing what was going on around the country. And then of course, the things that were happening with the Christian nationalist surge in the country over the last decade really sort of cemented the reason why I came to this work and stayed in this work. And so doesn’t really seem like that exciting of a story, but that’s sort of what caused me to specialize in it, just happenstance and then realizing just how important the work was and is. That’s why I’m here.
Liz Cavell: Yeah, and I mean, obviously we’ve stayed in it despite many grueling years and setbacks, and it always being sort of an underdogs fight. So I think that kind of speaks to how we feel about the values and the mission of the organizations we’ve worked for and also the other people that we worked alongside with in this movement. So it’s been a fulfilling, if frustrating career path.
Rebecca Markert: Exactly. Exactly. I have always said that my biggest goal right now is just to make sure that I am doing a job that I like doesn’t bore me and is intellectually stimulating, but also is one that I can be proud of that my children and my grandchildren can be proud of. And when they’re looking at history and seeing what happened in this moment in time, they are able to say, my mom or my grandmother did this awesome thing to help secure our rights.
Liz Cavell: Amen.
Rebecca Markert: Well, I think that is a great way to end our episode. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions. It’s always interesting to see what comes through.
Liz Cavell: Well, that’s it for today’s episode. If you don’t already, please be sure to check us out on our socials. We are on X, we’re on Facebook, Instagram, and now BlueSky. You can also find us online at we-dissent.org. We’d love to hear how you’re enjoying the show, so please also remember to leave us a review. Thanks for tuning in. I’m Liz Cavell.
Rebecca Markert: And I’m Rebecca Markert. Thanks for listening.
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.
