“I’m an atheist and I vote,” maintains Louisiana father and engineer Joe E. Mills on a billboard that has gone up on I-10 west of Dalrymple Drive in New Orleans.
Mills is part of a provocative secular voter campaign the Freedom From Religion Foundation is launching this weekend, which points out that 75 million adult Americans — nearly one in three — are nonreligious. In a variety of billboards and full-page newspaper ads, nonreligious Americans such as Mills are announcing that they devoutly want to keep religion out of government — and that they are voting accordingly.
Mills will also appear in two full-page newspaper ads running on Sunday, Sept. 18, in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Baton Rouge Advocate. The ads are timed to observe Constitution Day, Sept. 17, the 235th anniversary of the signing of what FFRF calls the “godless” Constitution.
Mills has a degree in electrical engineering from Tuskegee University (Magna Cum Laude), is the single father of two teens, and is part of a local affiliate of Black Nonbelievers. He is participating in round two of FFRF’s national secular values voter awareness campaign taking place in more than half the states around Constitution Day. The campaign visited other states in FFRF’s earlier “independence from religion” campaign over the Fourth of July. View all ads here.
In the ad, Mills says: “The ‘Nones’ (those of us unaffiliated with religion) are now 29 percent of the U.S. population. We are the largest ‘denomination’ by religious identification.”
Mills calls for keeping religion out of government, social policy and public schools. Notably, given the overturning of Roe. v. Wade and increasing attacks on LGBTQ rights, he also demands that religion be kept “out of bedrooms, personal lives and health care decisions — including when or whether to have children, and whom to love or marry.”
Full-page newspaper ads will also run in the Washington Post and 44 other newspapers, including those in many capital cities.
“We’re putting public candidates and officials on notice that secular voters are here, that WE are the true ‘values voters,’” adds Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-president, “and that it’s time that our secular viewpoint be respected and represented.”
The increasingly overt calls for Christian nationalism and the alarming recent tendency of the U.S. Supreme Court to privilege religion and eviscerate individual rights require that secular voices be heard, FFRF maintains.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has more than 38,000 members throughout North America, serves as a membership group for like-minded atheists, freethinkers and humanists, and works diligently as a state/church watchdog to uphold the constitutional principle of separation between state and church.
