June 11, 2020 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm
Although the atheist and humanist community is growing dramatically, we are severely underrepresented in the political arena. With our more active and visible participation in both the electoral and advocacy arenas we will help dispel the lingering bias against our community, build a society that respects science and reason, and advance evidence-based public policy to effectively address the issues that confront us.
Viewing Details
Watch a recording of this talk on YouTube here.
Speakers
Rachel Deitch is the Policy and Social Justice Manager at the Center for Freethought Equality and the American Humanist Association. She advocates for public policy that is inclusive of humanists and our organization’s secular and progressive values. Rachel has a background in national politics, advocacy, and strategic communications at the federal and state levels. She holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she conducted research on religion, stigma, and public policy.
Ron Millar is the Political and PAC Coordinator at the Center for Freethought Equality. He researches and interviews political candidates for possible endorsement by the Freethought Equality Fund, whose goal is to increase the number of open atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers in public office. Ron has spent more than thirty years in the Washington DC area working for nonprofit education and advocacy groups, including serving as the associate director of the Secular Coalition for America from 2005 to 2009.
Transcript
Thank you Emily for your kind introduction and for hosting this event.
So, why increase the political clout of the atheist and humanist community? For many the desire to increase political clout is too amass wealth or expand their other favorite currency power.
Power? Wealth? By increasing the political clout of atheist and humanist community we want to promote evidence-based public policy to effectively address the issues that confront us – like climate change and pandemic, and by having respected public officials identify with our community and allies embrace our community we will reduce the lingering bias against our community.
As an added benefit our active participation in the political process will counter the Christian nationalists and bring their bigoted, anti-science, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic crusade to an end.
I’m [Ron Millar, Political and PAC Coordinator] with the Center for Freethought Equality, which is the advocacy and political arm of the American Humanist Association. We also have a connected political action committee, called the Freethought Equality Fund. You might not be familiar with the Center for Freethought Equality or our PAC, but you might know our accomplishments. We were instrumental in having Congressman Jared Huffman announce that he is a humanist and agnostic – he is the only open nontheist member of Congress, and we helped him form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which is a membership group in Congress to foster science and evidence-based public policy and provides a forum for members of Congress to learn about the atheist and humanist movement. Through our PAC activities we have identified over 50 state legislators who identify with the atheist and humanist community. This is up from just five prior to the 2016 elections – a 900% increase; however, we need another 1,500 or so to reach parity with our population so we still have a lot of work to do.
That’s a lot so don’t worry if you missed something I’m going to unpack it in my next slides. I want to be up front with you in that my goals for this evening are to get you more involved in the political process and to get you to join the Center for Freethought Equality. The last one is easy because our membership is free!
First there was the American Humanist Association, our host for this evening. AHA is a 501(c)3 nonprofit education and membership organization founded in 1941. AHA has conducts a wide variety of great education and organizing activities, and also has an outstanding legal department protecting our Constitutional rights. However, as a c3 nonprofit AHA is limited in its legislative advocacy efforts and it cannot endorse, or appear to endorse, political candidates. On the plus side, your donations to AHA are tax deductible.
Then an advocacy and political nonprofit organization was formed in 2004 – the Center for Freethought Equality. In IRS terms CFE is a 501(c)4 nonprofit. As a c4, CFE can do unlimited legislative advocacy -- more commonly called lobbying. This is Rachel’s focus and she will be telling you more about her efforts later. The one drawback to a c4 is that donations to CFE are not tax deductible.
And next -- in 2013 the Freethought Equality Fund political action committee or PAC was formed. The PAC is connected to the Center for Freethought Equality (c4s are allowed to have connected PACs). FEF is a membership PAC so you must be a member of the Center for Freethought Equality to learn about and support the endorse candidates of the Freethought Equality Fund PAC. Like CFE, donations to the PAC and any of its endorsed candidates are not tax deductible.
This is my focus, but since not all of you are CFE members and this event is being hosted by AHA we will not be talking about 2020 candidates or answering any questions about candidates for elected office. However, we can talk about elected officials.
Just to recap … now you know players we can get on with our program.
The three organizations give us all the tools needed to increase our political clout – education, advocacy, and elections. Our goal is to increase the political clout of the atheist and humanist community in order to advance evidence-based public policy, fight to preserve the secular character of our government, promote social justice, and remove the bias against our community.
Not that long ago it was considered a political taboo to be an atheist and an elected official. Making a public announcement that you were an atheist was considered political suicide until …
In 2007, when I was working at the Secular Coalition for America, we helped Pete Stark announced he was a Unitarian who did not hold a god belief. This announcement was in response to a contest to find non-theist elected officials. An award was give to the person who identified the elected official at the highest level who would be public about it. In addition to Stark we also had few local elected officials and Ernie Chambers, who is a Nebraska state senator. Pete Stark was the first open nontheist member of Congress ever. He soon identified as a humanist and an atheist; however, he left Congress in 2013 and we did not have an open nontheist member of Congress until…
Ten years later when Jared Huffman announced he is a humanist, agnostic, and nonreligious. This came about after Huffman submitted an intriguing candidate questionnaire to our PAC, remember – the Freethought Equality Fund. This was followed by a lengthy email correspondence and finally a dinner meeting where we discussed atheist and humanist movement and our goals. Huffman then consulted with family, friends, supporters, and colleagues to make sure there were no surprises to those close to him when he made his public announcement. Because a number of members of Congress approached Huffman congratulating him on the importance of his announcement. Huffman decided to form …
the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which is both an affinity group for nontheist and allied members of Congress and a policy group to promote secular public policy. The founding co-chairs are Jared Huffman and Jamie Raskin. This group has the potential to change Congress and how Americans view atheists, humanists, and agnostics. In our initial dinner with Huffman, forming a caucus was one of the goals discussed – we told him at the time that he could not be a caucus of one, but we were pleased to be proven wrong. We were also thrilled that he asked us (CFE and AHA) to be participants in the two meetings with members of Congress that established the caucus.
Rachel will discuss the Caucus in more detail a little later.
You might be thinking that’s great for Congress, but what about the rest of the country. Well we are working on increasing our political clout across the country.
Before the 2016 election, we knew of only of 5 members of our community in elected office at the state level. With our work reaching out to candidates and elected officials …
today we have over 50 state legislators, from 21 states, who now identify with our community. That’s a 900% increase since 2016! You can see a complete list at our website. So 900% is an impressive increase, but it is not nearly enough.
According to Pew Research, our community when broadly defined to include the “nones” is about a quarter of the U.S. population.
Even with our massive 900% increase in elected officials who identify with us, this is only about two thirds of one percent of the total federal and state elected officials. We need another 1,500 seats to reach parity with our overall population, and that does not count the 500,000 local offices – we have a lot of work to do!
We need you to be a part of that work. Start by becoming a member of the Center for Freethought Equality – it’s FREE. Then use our resource pages to make your voice heard, engage your group, and run for office.
As an individual you need to be engaged in the political process. Register to vote and make sure that all your like-minded friends, family, and colleagues are registered. Then vote – not just every four years for president – but in every election and for every seat up and down the ballot. When you are doing your candidate research to make an informed vote – volunteer and/or donate to those candidates who are important to you. Share your information like-minded friends, family, and colleagues and encourage them to follow your lead in supporting your candidates. If you can do any of this and convey you are a member of the atheist and humanist community you increase our visibility.
If you belong to a local or state atheist or humanist group there are lots of activities you can do – like holding voter registration drives (see Secular America Votes), hosting or cohosting candidate forums, publishing legislative scorecards, creating candidate questionnaires and voter guides. Also, invite elected officials to speak to you group about their activities as an elected official.
Last consider running for public office. There are more than half a million offices – put your name on one of them.
Thank you very much for listening to me. I’ll now turn the program over to Rachel Deitch to tell you about the great advocacy work she is doing.
As Emily and Ron mentioned, my name is Rachel Deitch and I’m the Policy and Social Justice Manager at the Center for Freethought Equality and the American Humanist Association. I am the organizations’ lobbyist.
I want to remind everyone that if you have questions, please put them in the Q&A box in zoom or in the comments on Facebook and we’ll get to those in about 20 minutes.
I stepped into this role a year ago today actually. So I’m going to stick with what I know and focus on how we’ve been building influence on the hill in the last year.
At the founding of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, there were four members. Two years later, and they’ve tripled in number.
The caucus has four objectives:
• Promote public policy formed on the basis of reason, science, and moral values
• Protect the secular character of our government by adhering to strict Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state
• Oppose discrimination against atheists, agnostics, humanists, seekers, religious, and nonreligious persons and to champion the value of freedom of thought and conscience worldwide
• Provide a forum for members of Congress to discuss their moral frameworks, ethical values, and personal religious journeys
And as the caucus grows, the members bring new priorities and new ideas about what freethought leadership looks like. In February caucus co-chairs Huffman and Raskin led business meeting, to which secular organizations were invited. Members talked through a bunch of pertinent issues: including, secular addiction recovery, the hollowing out of public schools, the Equality Act, climate change, religious freedom (or lack thereof) in Kashmir, and a lot more. The take-away from that meeting wasn’t really the issues. We work on each of those. The take away is which member is looking for partners in the room on which issues. Casten and Huffman are working on climate, Jayapal and Wild are looking at international religious freedom, and they’re tackling these issues from a freethought vantage point. They are looking for support from the freethought community on tackling those issues. So, not only can I reach out to their offices and ask for their help on these issues, they’re asking us and our movement for support back.
And from that meeting, stem other meetings, which ultimately lead to public-facing actions
… These actions shape policy, but in this early stage of the CFC, these also grow the visibility of humanists and nontheists in Congress, in the Press, and in the Administration. Each new action CFC takes is a signpost that’s telling the world what humanists and nontheists care about. I recognize that we aren’t a monolithic movement. But leading from a freethought position helps shape not only our visibility but also our public character.
So moving away from some of the folks who are clearly already champions, whom we already have relationships with, I want to present a snapshot of how we’re building influence. And to do that clearly, I’m going to use a more extreme example: How might we build influence with those in power who normally fight against us? What would that look like?
Senator Lankford of Oklahoma would probably be the last person many of us would think of when it comes to voicing support for the rights of the nonreligious. But this quote is from last week. It was in a widely distributed press release about international religious freedom, wherein he also specifically calls out the rights of secularists. But this didn’t just happen, right? Atheists don’t just get included in press releases from very conservative senators.
And I want to emphasize that this quote isn’t the end game. I’m not giving myself a gold star for a press release. But in terms of chipping away at stigma and building relationships, it’s important to flag that quotes like these are becoming more common. Let’s talk through how we got here and what’s next.
So, when I want to explain something, I often rely on idioms and puns. I’ll try to limit that tonight, but I can’t help but include a few. In DC, we hear folks talk about death by a thousand cuts and drinking from a fire hose.
Death by a thousand cuts = rule changes done incrementally to carve away at our rights.
Drinking from a fire hose = all the agencies are tweaking the rules, and there are so many proposed changes that instinct could drive us to spend most of our time in a reactionary or defensive posture, which is what the administration wants.
But when we are talking about policy, we really aren’t talking about paper cuts. We’re talking about gutting our rights and anti-discrimination protections. We’re talking about food, the right to abortion. We’re talking about changing the way we collect data and present evidence for civil rights protections in our schools, healthcare for transgender people, and housing. It can seem really daunting. And I want to flag that these clips all pretty much came from a three-month span. There’s a lot going on that we need to address. But I’m not a housing expert, and I’m certainly not an education expert.
My background is in social justice aligned advocacy and coalition building, and there are some social justice tactics that we should be applying across our work. Follow the lead of impacted communities. Right? When we are trying to problem solve, taking your cues from those experiencing the brunt of the problem is not only good sense, but also how we enter right relationship with marginalized groups.
And ultimately, this approach builds our network. It puts me as our lobbyist in relationship with other organizations that we might not have worked with in the past, who might not know what humanists are or why atheists have a particular stake in what’s going on. These are immense opportunities for us to introduce our values, and ourselves and leverage our resources to show that we’re serious.
I think sometimes we underestimate the importance of coalition building when it comes to building influence.
The AHA is a member of a bunch of broad coalitions, including:
International Religious Freedom Roundtable
National Coalition for Public Education
Coalition Against Religious Discrimination
Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights - Education and Immigration Task Forces
Washington Interreligious Staff Community - Racial Justice Working Group
Small Lobby for Reproductive Justice
These are ridiculously helpful in not only getting stuff done and responding to the fire hose and the paper cuts, but also in building strong relationships that translate into influence.
These are our broad coalitions, but we also have hyper-specific or issue specific coalitions. Like our anti-blasphemy law coalition.
For folks who aren’t familiar. Blasphemy laws around the world are laws that criminalize blasphemous speech or actions. They most often target religious minorities, the nonreligious, women, LGBTQ people, and political dissidents. There are more than 80 countries that we know of that still have blasphemy laws on their books. A week after I started, we got Rep. Raskin to introduce the resolution in the House.
When I started in 2019, we had around 30 organizations supporting our blasphemy work. Because of our increased activity in a number of coalitions, and specifically the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, where I was showing up every week that number is approaching 70. And frankly, numbers matter here. It speaks to our ability to organize effectively and to the mission. But beyond this list of supportive organizations, are a handful of groups that have joined me in the more than 100 advocacy meetings I’ve done on this issue on the hill. These groups open doors, frankly usually more conservative doors.
For this resolution, I knew that if we wanted to get it moving, we needed 30 cosponsors, 10 of whom had to be on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And we had to get republican support within the committee. When I started, I had so much trouble getting in front of republican staffers whose bosses sit on HFAC. It was laughable and slow. But after I redirected my efforts away from the hill and toward civil society organizations like the ones listed here, it was like a flip switched.
After we built a strong coalition, we started having productive meetings with people who could really give the resolution a bump. In these meetings I was still talking about how blasphemy laws impact atheists. I was talking about our organizations and what we do. I’m not walking into meetings being coy about who I represent (which would be highly unethical); I’m being unapologetically atheist. But we also have multiple Christian, Muslim, Jewish organizations in the room who have all become wonderful and effective partners in this work.
That’s the value of a broad coalition, which…
…gets us a seat at the table
Because of the relationships we’ve built, and the hard work we’ve put in. We had substantive meetings with key republicans and key democrats, built a bi-partisan sponsorship list, which ultimately led to a hearing on international religious persecution. And AHA was one of four witnesses to testify in front of Congress about the harm blasphemy laws do to atheists and humanists. That’s huge for our community. It was the first time AHA has ever testified before Congress.
The hearing is kind of the part. After that, the resolution was passed out of committee in March and we are looking forward to seeing it pass the House this year.
And it’s because of all this, our coalition building, the hundreds of meetings, and delivering on our work, that humanists and atheists are taken seriously in these spaces. This quote is meaningful. A staunchly conservative Christian republican is on the record saying he supports the rights of nonreligious people because we’ve been meeting Lankford’s staff regularly in our coalition work. But I want to reiterate that it doesn’t culminate in a quote – the quote’s a signpost toward the kind of world and policy we are trying to build. Because quotes are meaningless unless they’re coupled with action.
…and it’s about getting stuff done.
After Mubarak Bala was arrested in Nigeria, I spoke with Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, urging him to take action on Bala’s behalf. Only a few hours later, he tweeted our exact list of demands. A few days later, the secular movement was successful in getting USCIRF to issue a public statement. And a week after that, Rep. Raskin led a letter to the State Department calling for greater action. As far as we know, the United States was the first country to make public calls on Nigeria to release Bala and ensure his rights. And three different entities did so. That’s the direct result of the influence we’ve been building.
And while this presentation is about building influence, I want to name that I prepared this presentation before George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others were murdered. There are some good police reform bills being considered right now, and the coalitions we are a part of are analyzing how we move forward. We look forward to supporting some of that legislation.
[A question and answer period followed]
