April 19
Bertrand Russell (Quote)
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.“My own view on religion is that of Lucretius [Roman philosopher, c. 99-55 BCE]. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”
— Bertrand Russell, "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?" (1930)
Dana Nessel
On this date in 1969, Dana Michelle Nessel — attorney and LGBTQ+ advocate — was born to Sandra and Martin Nessel in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Her impoverished immigrant Jewish grandparents fled Europe to escape the Holocaust.
A Democrat who calls the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “pretty inspirational,” she is the first openly gay woman elected to statewide office and the first Jewish person elected attorney general in Michigan. She rose to further prominence by winning over 20 convictions of Catholic clergy indicted by a statewide grand jury in a probe that launched in 2018 and resulted in hundreds of tips.
Her advice to abuse victims to be forthcoming with law enforcement and resist nondisclosure agreements with the church angered Catholic leaders like Bill Donohue and other theocrats: “If an investigator comes to your door and asks to speak with you, please ask to see their badge and not their rosary.” (Detroit News, Feb. 21, 2019)
Nessel also got a lot of coverage and a little heat for an ad during her first campaign in which she said voters should trust her to take sexual harassment seriously: “When you’re choosing Michigan’s next attorney general, ask yourself this: Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting? Is it the candidate who doesn’t have a penis? I’d say so.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 5, 2022)
After playing high school soccer and being named all-state, Nessel earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Wayne State University Law School in 1994. She performed stand-up comedy for several years in college. After law school, she worked as an assistant prosecutor in Wayne County for 11 years before opening her own firm in 2005.
Nessel left the prosecutor’s office because she pregnant with what she thought were twin boys and needed more income. The pregnancy ended her relationship and introduced her to the inequities in Michigan’s family law; there was no way for two women to be legal parents. “I assumed there was some paperwork you could draft or something, but there was absolutely nothing we could do. My girlfriend said she was not going to feel comfortable raising children that would never legally be hers. I was bitter that Michigan had turned me into a single parent unnecessarily.” (Hour Detroit, June 24, 2020)
She soon learned she was actually carrying triplets and that they weren’t growing. “I was told by my doctor that really the only chance of me being able to carry these babies to the point of viability would be if I aborted one of them. It would give the other two at least a chance of survival.” (Fox 2 Detroit, April 7, 2022) She had the abortion and sons Alex and Zach were born prematurely at 3 pounds each and have thrived. She married Alanna Maguire, who was raised Catholic, in July 2015. They met while working on DeBoer v. Snyder.
She and other attorneys had successfully argued for the plaintiffs in DeBoer v. Snyder, which was filed in 2012 and challenged Michigan’s ban on legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The case was eventually combined with others and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, which led to nationwide legal recognition. In 2016 she founded Fair Michigan to make attacks on the LGBTQ+ community prosecutable as hate crimes. As attorney general, Nessel launched a hate crimes unit and established an elder abuse task force. Her margin of election in 2018 was 2.7%. She increased that to 8.6% in 2022.
In 2019 she withdrew the state from eight lawsuits in which her Republican predecessor Bill Schuette had filed amicus briefs asserting the conservative positions on reproductive rights, state-church separation and discrimination based on gender. Three cases involved FFRF: One challenged the presence of a Latin cross on the Lehigh County seal and flag in Pennsylvania; another in Wisconsin challenged allowing income tax exemptions for religious clergy but not for FFRF officers; and a third contested the U.S. House chaplain’s refusal to let FFRF Co-President Dan Barker deliver an invocation on the House floor.
Nessel traces her values back to the Reform Judaism she was exposed to while growing up at Temple Kol Ami. “The values that we learned at my temple had a lot to do with empathy and compassion for all people, caring about people who were different and who had been ostracized in society in a lot of ways, much in the way that the Jewish community historically has.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Nov. 5, 2022)
Attendees at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago heard her blunt words to the opposition, including the Thomas-Alito wing of the Supreme Court: “You can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead, gay hand. And I’m retaining a lot of water, so good luck with that.” (Washington Post, Aug. 22, 2024)
“As I am a member of more than one minority community, it’s led me to be a fervent supporter of separation of church and state.”
— Nessel interview, Kveller online (June 24, 2021)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
