A recent chain of judicial decisions underscores how the federal courts have been packed with extremists and highlights the need for immediate court reform, asserts the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Last night, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative bloc upheld an order from a President Trump-appointed judge to reinstate a harsh Trump immigration policy. Trump’s notoriously cruel “Remain in Mexico” policy required those seeking asylum to stay out of the country while their applications were pending, even though doing so needlessly placed them in danger. Trump based the policy on the debunked narrative of people not attending their asylum hearings once they’re in the United States. The cruelty was the point of the Trump policy, which the new administration quickly repealed.

The changing nature of our democracy is precisely why the right-wing Federalist Society wanted to pack the federal judiciary with so many young ideologues, since repealing harsh policies then becomes effectively impossible. In this case, 44-year-old Trump-appointed District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had the opportunity to forcefully reimpose Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, and that’s what he did despite no credible legal rationale, evidence or support for his decision. Kacsmaryk ordered President Biden to reinstate Trump’s policy within seven days.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, both of which have been packed with Trump judges, declined to stay Kacsmaryk’s order, even though appellate courts normally would do so to maintain the status quo while the case proceeds.

“This is the Supreme Court rubber-stamping a federal district judge dictating policy from the bench,” observes FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The federal government cannot operate when the courts have been so packed with extremists hell-bent on imposing cruel and unpopular politics that are based on fringe religious beliefs. We have a broken court system.”

Kacsmaryk is a perfect example of a young extremist who never should have been confirmed as a federal judge. Prior to his lifetime appointment, Kacsmaryk was general counsel for First Liberty, a virulently anti-LGBTQ, anti-choice outfit that spins Christian persecution narratives and promotes outright Christian nationalism. He idolizes the late Justice Antonin Scalia and prefers a “dead Constitution.” FFRF called on members to oppose Kacsmaryk’s nomination.

The damage done to the federal judiciary through judges like Kacsmaryk — including three U.S. Supreme Court justices — will last a generation or more unless it is swiftly corrected. Trump nominated 274 federal judges, ramming through the nomination process with minimal review. Those judges’ unprecedented youth and radical ideologies mean that they will leave the courts deeply unbalanced for all too many years.

Yesterday’s action by the Supreme Court should be an immediate wake-up call to America. The federal courts have been hijacked — and must be restored. Expanding the number of federal judges is decades overdue, with several federal cases taking many years to complete because there are so few judges.

Congress has the ability to fix this problem by expanding the federal judiciary at every level. Every other avenue of progress will be blocked until our broken court system is addressed. Americans should bombard their members of Congress with calls to fix this miscarriage of justice immediately.

Stop abusing your official position in the name of religion, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is rebuking the Mississippi agriculture and commerce commissioner.

Andy Gipson posted a video to his official Facebook page on Aug. 18, in which he is identified by his official title and in which he is apparently sitting in his government office. The video appears to have been professionally shot and produced, suggesting government resources. Gipson tells Mississippi residents that this is “a time we need to pause and pray, and ask God to intervene in this situation. … I’m reminded in the book of Nehemiah, as they were rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem … they also prayed. It says they prayed to their god. … Ultimately, this is an opportunity for you and for me to practice what we say we believe: In God We Trust. And we can trust God to get us through this storm. Would you join me in praying for Mississippi?”

As a state official, Gipson represents a diverse population that consists of not only Christians, but also citizens with nonreligious or minority religious views, FFRF reminds him.

“Religious endorsements coming from your office needlessly alienate the nonreligious and non-Christian citizens you represent, turning them into political outsiders in their own community,” FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write to the Mississippi agriculture and commerce commissioner. “Such social media posts send the message to your minority religious and nonreligious residents that their state government sees their views as less valued than that of their Christian counterparts.”

The Supreme Court has held that government officials violate the First Amendment if they even appear to endorse religion, FFRF underscores. By promoting his personal religious beliefs on official social media pages, Gipson violates the obligation under the Constitution as a public official.

Courts are willing to treat accounts that politicians believe to be private as official government accounts when they are used to disseminate official government communications. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted that Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was composed of “official statements by the president of the United States.” (Hawaii v. Trump) FFRF sees no legal reason why Gipson’s social media accounts would be treated differently.

Even if Gipson is a Baptist minister in addition to being a government official, the U.S. Constitution still applies to him, FFRF emphasizes. That’s why he must refrain from promoting his personal religious beliefs while speaking on behalf of the government — and while using government power and resources — because he represents all Mississippians, not just Christians.

FFRF is asking Gipson to stop posting religious endorsements on his official social media pages and to immediately delete his religious video.

“Willful obliviousness isn’t an excuse for the commissioner to misuse official assets,” adds Gaylor.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 35,000 members across the country, including many members in Mississippi. FFRF protects the constitutional separation between state and church and educates about nontheism.

KATINA GEHN is FFRF's Shop Manager/Program Assistant. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Winona State University in 2021. Her hobbies include trying new restaurants and recipes, thrift shopping, supporting theatre, and going to the farmer's market.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is calling on the Biden administration to ensure that refugees from Afghanistan, including freethinkers and religious minorities, are given quick and safe passage.

The Taliban, a religious militia bent on installing a theocracy, has essentially overrun and captured the nation. Despite the outfit’s public assurances, the United Nations is reporting that it is receiving “chilling reports of severe restrictions on human rights throughout” Afghanistan. The secretary-general is “particularly concerned by accounts of mounting human rights violations against the women and girls of Afghanistan, who fear a return to the darkest days” of the earlier spell of Taliban rule a bit over two decades ago.

The dire circumstances facing Afghan nonbelievers are unimaginable. FFRF is calling on Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to ensure refugee processing without bureaucratic delay, and with special allowances that recognize the difficulty people face in leaving Afghanistan, particularly Afghan freethinkers.

“The Taliban has a proven history of human rights abuses of women, freethinkers, and anyone who is not seen as a hardline fundamentalist,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “America cannot turn its back on so many Afghans who have fought for years to live their authentic lives. Freethinkers in Afghanistan must be protected and be able to find safe haven elsewhere.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has worked to rescue secular, atheist and nonreligious activists in other countries, including Bangladesh.

FFRF Staff Attorney Ryan Jayne warns in one of Missouri’s most prominent newspapers about the drawbacks of a new statewide school voucher program.

“Starting next year, state tax money will begin to pay for tuition at private religious schools, mostly for students who would have gone to those schools anyway, thanks to a voucher scheme that Gov. Mike Parson recently signed into law,” Jayne explains in the Springfield News-Leader. “Public funds will now flow into the coffers of church-owned private schools, an arrangement several U.S. Founders vehemently opposed.”

Jayne goes on to elucidate the various negative aspects of the voucher program:

Where public money goes, public accountability should follow. Instead, the Missouri voucher scheme does just the opposite, stating that none of its provisions “permit any government agency to exercise control or supervision over” voucher schools. This is a program that amounts to throwing money into a black hole and hoping for the best, an open invitation to fraud and abuse. This has been tested elsewhere and fails every time.

And the narrative of vouchers rescuing low-income students from underperforming public schools is simply false. First of all, the voucher program creates the problem it purports to fix by intercepting funds that would otherwise go to public schools. Second, studies of voucher schemes in other states repeatedly show no evidence that the academic situation of students with vouchers is improved compared to public school students. Third, across the country we have seen that the lion’s share of voucher funds ends up paying for the tuition of children who would have gone to private schools anyway.

Plus, the new voucher program leaves many kids behind. Only K-12 students in Missouri’s largest cities are eligible to participate, defunding rural schools with no possible benefit. Voucher schools are also allowed to discriminate against students with disabilities, LGBT students or virtually anyone else the school disfavors. The program states that voucher schools “shall not be required to alter its … admissions policy.” This is taxpayer-funded discrimination, plain and simple.

Jayne concludes: “Missouri lawmakers have taken scarce funds away from children and given it to churches. Students deserve better. Legislators should scrap the program before it does serious damage.”

You can read the full op-ed here.

This column is a part of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s initiative to engage with pertinent issues at the national and the state levels and spread the messages of freethought and nontheism to a mainstream audience.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is exposing the fact that the attempted bombing at the U.S. Capitol today was conducted by an apparent white Christian nationalist.

The state/church watchdog is also condemning as “highly irresponsible” U.S. Rep. Mo Brook’s minimizing response to the attempt, saying that he understands “citizenry anger.” Brooks, a six-term member, gave an incendiary speech at the Jan. 6 Save America rally near the Capitol, where he said: “Today is the day that American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”

The would-be terrorist—whose name is deliberately omitted here—drove his black pickup truck from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and parked it in front of the Library of Congress with a homemade bomb. He live-streamed several rants leading to a standoff with Capitol police before being taken into custody, proclaiming, “I was picked by the American people. . . . I love this land. I love God.”

In unhinged, threatening, and blame-shifting rants, he argued that if the bomb he made and drove to D.C. went off, it would be Joe Biden’s fault. A clear thread of Christian nationalism sprinkled his rhetoric and earlier social media posts. In one video, he said that he told his wife he’d “Be home Sunday, whichever home it is,” meaning he thought he would be going to Heaven. “I've cleared my conscience with God,” he added “I have no fear.”

He stated that he wanted to start “The Revolution” with a bomb and continue the work the mob started on Jan. 6. The bombing suspect can be heard talking to his viewers in another live streamnother live stream and made posts indicating he swallowed the Big Lie that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen. Other posts, as recent as Tuesday, suggest he thought Donald Trump would pardon him because his action would somehow make Trump president.

Just last Friday, the Homeland Security issued a heightened domestic terror threat for the remainder of 2021, specifically for “Racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists.” The DHS threat announcement specifically singles out “domestic violent extremists, continue to introduce, amplify, and disseminate narratives online that promote violence, and have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious communities or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals.”

FFRF Director of Strategic Response Andrew L. Seidel, who wrote a book on the disinformation that feeds the Christian nationalist identity, explained that “Christian nationalism operates as a permission structure that justifies otherwise immoral acts by appealing to a higher power.”

Seidel adds: “He thinks of himself as chosen by the nation, chosen by his god, as an ‘American patriot.’”

“The Christian nationalism undergirding the Jan. 6 putsch must be exposed and defeated, or this kind of terrorism will escalate,” warns Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Newsmax, and the rest bear some of the blame for continuing to stoke the fires of Christian nationalist terrorism, FFRF concludes.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is urging its hometown school district to follow the lead of progressive school districts around the country and mandate staff Covid-19 vaccinations.

In a letter to the Madison (Wis.) Metropolitan School District Board of Education and Superintendent Carlton D. Jenkins, FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor exhort them to adopt “common-sense, data-driven Covid-19 prevention measures.” 

FFRF points out that mandating only masking, “while ignoring the cure for the disease — Covid-19 vaccinations — is neither acceptable public policy nor good science.”

A national state/church watchdog, FFRF is headquartered in Madison, Wis., and so FFRF has a personal stake in the school district’s policies, particularly since many FFRF staff members have school-age children. The freethought group notes that the nonreligious are the most apt and willing to be vaccinated, according to a Pew survey.

As of two days ago, the Madison Metropolitan School District indicated it won’t require staff to be vaccinated or even undergo regular testing for Covid-19. Yet, Gov. Tony Evers is expressing support for mandatory teacher vaccinations and the Madison Teachers Union surveyed its members and found a majority in favor of a mandate.

“This is irresponsible. Our public schools exist to educate — and in the midst of a pandemic, that includes showing leadership on the need to inoculate,” says Gaylor. “Dane County at one time was leading the country in Covid-19 inoculations. Let’s start following the science, quit propitiating the science deniers and lead the country again in full vaccination rates.”

FFRF has likewise urged Madison, Dane County and Public Health Madison to follow the lead of San Francisco, New York City, and countries such as France and Italy, by requiring proof of vaccination to enter places of public accommodation, such as restaurants and bars. Such measures work.

As FFRF has noted, “Begging, bribing and, sadly, reasoning with vaccine-hesitant individuals has not done the job. You have it within your authority to make Dane County No. 1 again in full vaccinations, to quell the surge and ensure that reason and science prevail.”

Last week, FFRF urged President Biden to employ more executive measures to incentivize vaccine mandates, such as by withholding federal funding to school districts that do not require vaccinations for all eligible. Yesterday, Biden did require all nursing home employees to be fully vaccinated.

The Madison school district must do its part and show leadership to protect staff and students, especially those students not yet eligible to be vaccinated. Our nation has it within its grasp to defeat Covid-19, FFRF concludes.

Stop excluding nonreligious citizens by posting sectarian religious messages on your social media, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is chastising the Tennessee governor.

A concerned Tennessee resident has contacted the national state/church watchdog to report that Gov. Bill Lee has a pattern of posting religious messages on his official Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. For instance, one of his official tweets quotes Luke 2.14: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” And a post from a few months ago on his official Facebook account quotes Psalms 90: “Let the favor of our Lord God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands.” These are just a few examples of dozens of religious postings he has sent out over the past couple of years.

As governor, Lee represents a diverse population that consists of not only Christians, but also minority religious and nonreligious citizens, FFRF emphasizes. Sectarian religious endorsements made in his official capacity send a message that excludes the 30 percent of Americans who are non-Christians, including one in four Americans who is religiously unaffiliated. By couching his sentiments in religious terms, and by quoting exclusively from one religion’s holy book, Lee unnecessarily excludes a significant portion of the community. These social media posts send the message to nonreligious and minority religious constituents that their participation in the political process is less valued than that of their Christian counterparts.

Our Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which protects all Americans’ religious freedom by ensuring the continued separation of religion and government, dictates that the government cannot in any way endorse religion, FFRF reminds the governor.

“The First Amendment prohibits even the appearance of religious endorsement by government officials,” FFRF Staff Attorney Chris Line writes to Lee. “Promoting your personal religious beliefs on your official social media pages violates your obligation under the Constitution as a public official.”

And the Supreme Court has described the power of social media sites as “the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.” That’s why government officials must be particularly diligent not to entangle their personal religious beliefs with official government pronouncements made in this “modern public square,” FFRF stresses. Courts are willing to treat accounts that politicians believe to be private as official government accounts when they are used to disseminate official communications (as in Hawaii v. Trump). FFRF sees no legal reason why Lee’s social media pages would be treated differently.

Government officials can worship, pray or quote any religious text they wish when acting in their personal capacities, FFRF underscores, but they are not permitted to provide prestige to their personal religion by lending a government office and government title to religious ideology. As governor, Bill Lee is charged with great responsibility and has been given significant trust by citizens of the great state of Tennessee, including those citizens who do not share his religious viewpoint. Sticking to secular messages is inclusive of everyone and honors our Constitution — the document he swore to uphold when he took his oath of office.

This is why FFRF is asking Lee to disassociate the governor’s office from his personal religious beliefs and refrain from posting religious messages on his official social media pages.

“Social media should be a venue for officials to communicate with all their constituents and not to communion with a believing subset,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a nationwide nonprofit organization with more than 35,000 members and several chapters across the country, including over 400 members and a local chapter in Tennessee. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters related to nontheism.

Do not lead this country further away from its secular roots, the Freedom From Religion Foundation is admonishing one of the recently elected senators from Georgia.

Sen. Jon Ossoff presided over a nearly empty Senate chamber in late July while it adopted by unanimous consent Senate Resolution 309, which praised the inclusion of the addition of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. This was a historically inaccurate and divisive resolution, FFRF contends, which should not have been approved, much less in this manner.

“SR 309 camouflages itself as an innocuous affirmation of the Pledge of Allegiance,” FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write to Ossoff. “However, there are a number of clear falsehoods, historical exaggerations and constitutionally incorrect assumptions in the text of the resolution that taint it and should preclude it from receiving unanimous support in the future.”

First, the resolution claims that “many” of the Founders of the United States were “deeply religious.” However, the major Founders, including Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Hamilton, were either openly skeptical, dismissive of religion or deeply private about their personal convictions. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution were first among nations to adopt a godless and entirely secular Constitution, whose only references to religion are exclusionary and which bars a religious test for public office.

Second, SR 309 glorifies the “60 years” that the Pledge has acknowledged the United States as a union established “under God” and claims a “secular purpose” for the use of that phrase. That supposed secular purpose is a false pretense created during the Cold War. Congress added the words “under God” at the height of McCarthyism.

Finally, and most significantly, the constitutionality of “under God” in the Pledge remains dubious and suspect, and its continued presence does not reflect the changing religious demographics and diversity of the United States. Nonreligious Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population by religious identification — 35 percent of Americans are non-Christians, and this includes the more than one in four Americans now identifying as religiously unaffiliated.

Whole generations of schoolchildren have been miseducated, thanks to the tampering with the original secular Pledge, to falsely equate religiosity with patriotism, FFRF underscores. And the harm of pledging a secular nation to a particular god extends beyond mere miseducation. With this un-American addition, our public schools have been dividing children along religious lines, cleaving classrooms into groups who adhere to this Christian vision of the United States and those who don’t.

It would actually be a sign of strength, FFRF suggests, when “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is willing to re-examine the past and turn the country back to a path of constitutional and secular values. The addition of the words “under God” in 1954 quite literally divided “one Nation” from “indivisible” — and has helped maintain religious divisiveness ever since.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 35,000 members and several chapters across the country, including over 500 members and a chapter in Georgia. FFRF protects the constitutional separation between state and church and educates the public about nontheism.

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The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s reproductive rights intern is calling in an op-ed in its hometown newspaper for Wisconsin’s senior senator to respect science.

FFRF Anne Nicol Gaylor Reproductive Rights Intern Barbara Alvarez is urging in the Madison, Wisconsin, Cap Times Sen. Ron Johnson to approve without deleterious anti-abortion provisions a budget that the House of Representatives recently passed.

The piece explains:

For the first time in 45 years, the House of Representatives has passed a federal budget excluding the draconian Hyde and Weldon Amendments. Both of these appropriations riders severely restrict abortion access to women throughout the country, including in Wisconsin. The Hyde Amendment, first proposed by Rep. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, denies affordable abortion care to low-income women on Medicaid (one in five women in the United States), as well as those on the Indian Health Services Plan and in the Peace Corps, unless their state is one of the few to cover such care. The Weldon Amendment, initially introduced in 2005, unwisely allows health care providers to refuse to cover, provide, pay or refer someone for an abortion based on “religious or moral grounds.”

Alvarez then goes on to outline how, contrary to anti-abortion propaganda, abortion is a very safe procedure. She also spells out the various ways in which the two amendments harm women’s health and well-being in states such as Wisconsin.

“As one of 33 states that do not provide abortion care under the Hyde Amendment, health inequalities are exacerbated here,” she writes. “Maternal health in Wisconsin is among the poorest in the nation and maternal mortality for Black women is five times higher than for white women. Instead of denying comprehensive reproductive health care, we should be expanding it.”

The column concludes with an appeal: “Sen. Johnson needs to do the right thing and approve the federal budget without the Hyde and Weldon Amendments.”

You can read the full op-ed here.

This column is a part of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s initiative to engage with pertinent issues at the national and the state levels and spread the messages of freethought and nontheism to a mainstream audience.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is urging the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents to push back against anti-science legislative interference and mandate Covid-19 vaccinations.

A number of state university systems, including in California, Illinois, Colorado and New York, have already adopted measures to require students to be vaccinated to attend in-person classes. Countless other individual colleges and universities, including the private Marquette and Lawrence universities in Wisconsin, have also imposed vaccination mandates.

Yet, the UW System has merely toyed with inadequate masking mandates. “Mandating masking-only while ignoring the cure for the disease — Covid-19 vaccinations — is neither acceptable public policy nor good science,” write FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor in a letter to UW System Interim President Tommy Thompson.

FFRF notes that the return of tens of thousands of students who may not be vaccinated to Madison, where the state/church watchdog is based, is reason for alarm, given what happened a year ago when the UW-Madison’s reopening as well as college reopenings around the country, led to dramatic pandemic surges.

“Countless businesses and individuals across the UW’s 26 campuses statewide are equally concerned and affected by the lack of a vaccine mandate by the UW System,” FFRF notes. “The UW System is not operating in a vacuum.”

FFRF recently wrote a strong protest to Wisconsin state Sen. Steve Nass over his action to force the UW System to beg permission of his Rules Committee before adopting pandemic mitigation efforts. Gaylor and Barker expressed “dismay over the high-handed and anti-democratic decision” by the Senate Rules Committee, dominated by extremists, that resulted in it adopting Nass’ micromanaging policy.

In terms of the right of the university to mandate vaccines, an action by the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals at the start of this week signals that such rights will be upheld, FFRF maintains. An appeals panel in Chicago sided with Indiana University over its vaccination mandate by refusing to enjoin the vaccination policy when eight students challenged the mandate. The unanimous ruling by three conservative judges demolished arguments against the right of the public university to mandate a vaccine.

“We hope that ruling will give the Board of Regents some backbone to follow in Indiana University’s footsteps to do everything it can to protect the lives and health of students and the communities they live in by mandating Covid-19 vaccinations,” adds Gaylor. She points to the Food and Drug Administration’s expected full approval of the Pfizer vaccine by Labor Day as yet another reason for the UW System to act swiftly to protect student health and side with science.

“We simply cannot accept any additional preventable deaths or the prolonging of the pandemic when the remedy is at hand,” FFRF concludes.