Former Miami-Dade School Board Vice Chair Lubby Navarro, who previously voted to officially recognize the National Day of Prayer in order to show her Christian bona fides, was recently arrested for fraudulent spending on official district credit cards.
Navarro is accused of making nearly $100,000 worth of unauthorized purchases on her school district credit cards. These personal purchases reportedly included food, groceries, appliances, vacations and more.
Navarro is a notorious figure who the Freedom From Religion Foundation previously called out during her time on the Miami-Dade School Board. In 2022, Navarro joined the rest of the school board in officially recognizing the National Day of Prayer to ensure that “students are encouraged to organize and have a day to pray together.” Navarro crowed that she hoped the school board vote would “send a message to our community that we have one creator, one creator, and that is God and Jesus Christ.”
FFRF wrote to the district at the time, urging the board to end its official support for the event. The state/church watchdog noted that by instituting a day of prayer and seeking to involve Christian churches and organizations in arranging districtwide activities, the board needlessly alienated the students and families belonging to the 37 percent of Americans who are non-Christian, including the nearly one in three Americans who identified as religiously unaffiliated. Navarro had been appointed to the board in 2015 by then-Gov. Rick Scott, and announced in December 2022 that she would be leaving.
“Christian nationalists continually tar atheists and other nonbelievers as immoral, simply for using reason rather than blind faith in judging religion,” notes FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It’s important to point out that conspicuous displays of piety bear no relation to true morality.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with more than 40,000 members and several chapters across the country, including over 2,000 members and a local chapter in Florida. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
If you are an FFRF member, sign into your account here and then update your email subscriptions here.
To become an FFRF member, click here. To learn more about FFRF, request information here.
