A Phoenix resident, “retired corporate executive, small business owner, great-grandfather, native Arizonian . . . and Humanist,” is featured on a full-size billboard at Van Buren Street 140 feet east of Third Avenue, proclaiming in Spanish, “Soy humanista y voto” ( “I’m humanist and I vote”). The billboard will be up for one month.
Zenaido Quintana is representing Arizona in a national secular voter campaign launched by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in this critical election year. He is one of 75 million nonreligious Americans who want Congress, state legislatures, public officials and courts to listen to “secular values voters” by keeping religion out of government and social policy — and that includes on the question of abortion rights.
Quintana, a native of Phoenix, was educated as a chemical engineer and previously served as a corporate officer and board member for major companies in the electronics, environmental and construction industries. The FFRF member is a founder and served as chair of the Secular Coalition for Arizona, president of the Valley of the Sun Chapter of FFRF, president of Greater Phoenix Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, president of Freethought Arizona and president of the Board of Directors of ACLU of Arizona.
Quintana will also be featured in a full-page ad headlined “I’m Secular and I Vote,” running in the Arizona Republic on Sunday, July 3, which pictures him in front of the state Capitol.
“We’re putting public candidates and officials on notice that secular voters are here, that WE are the true ‘values voters’ and that it’s time that our secular viewpoint be heard and represented,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor.
In the ad, Quintana notes, “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!”
Quintana, saying he “trusts in reason, science and America’s secular Constitution,” lists a compelling number of secular voter demands: As a secular American, he wants to keep religion out of government and social policy, out of public schools, and out of bedrooms, personal lives and health care decisions — including when or whether to have children, and whom to love or marry. “Use my tax dollars only for evidence-based, not faith-based, purposes,” he emphasizes.
FFRF is running the billboards and newspaper ads in time for the July 4 weekend in about half of the United States, with the rest appearing around Sept. 17, Constitution Day.
The ad campaign is particularly timely given that the U.S. Supreme Court, at the behest of religiously motivated court challenges, has just overturned Roe v. Wade and turned abortion rights back to state legislative decree, where it is endangered in Arizona. Gaylor notes that 98.8 percent of FFRF’s membership supports Roe, which is consistent with a YouGov analysis showing that atheists, at 91 percent overall, are the most likely to identify as pro-choice.
Gaylor called the Supreme Court trend to privilege religion, as well as the likely banning of abortion in more than half the states, alarming. “That’s why our secular voices must be heard.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation serves as the largest association of freethinkers in North America, with more than 36,000 members including more than 950 in Arizona and works as a state/church watchdog to safeguard the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. To learn more, visit: ffrf.org.
