The Freedom From Religion Foundation is calling out Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez after her recent comment at an anti-abortion rally deriding people who “vote like atheists.”
FFRF learned of a “campaign-like rally” on Monday where Núñez and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared in their official capacities to oppose Amendment 4, a pro-legal abortion amendment on the Florida ballot. At the event, Núñez remarked, “We cannot go to church and pray like Christians and turn around and vote like atheists.”
FFRF blasted her insulting implication that it is wrong to “vote like an atheist,” and also her false assumption that Christians in general don’t support reproductive freedom.
“While your remarks were intended to denigrate atheists and promote your own Christian beliefs, in fact we would suggest that our country would be a whole lot better off if more people ‘voted like an atheist,’” FFRF Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker have written to Núñez, citing surveys showing the humanistic voter values of atheists and other nonreligious Americans. They also cited statistics showing that abortion rights are favored by a majority of America’s faithful, even Catholics and Mormons, with the exception of white evangelicals and similar strains.
FFRF requested that in future Núñez refrain from using her elected position as lieutenant governor to denigrate minority beliefs on religion while promoting her own personal religious beliefs. She’s free to practice her religion in her personal capacity, but not to abuse her authority as a government official to turn one class — her kind of Christian — into a favored class, and turn another class — atheists — into a disfavored class.
As lieutenant governor of Florida, Núñez is tasked with upholding the U.S. Constitution — including the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Núñez serves a diverse state that consists not only of Christians, but also Jewish, Muslim, atheist and other non-Christian constituents. When she promotes Christianity through official communications, she marginalizes and excludes many of her constituents. A full 37 percent of Americans are non-Christian, including nearly one-in-three Americans on a national level who are religiously unaffiliated. The religiously unaffiliated specifically comprise 26 percent of Florida’s population.
“Please start honoring the secular Constitution you took an oath to uphold,” FFRF concludes.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters across the country, including 2,000 members and the Central Florida Freethought Community 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.
