Americans United for Separation of Church and State has launched a national campaign to put a human face on the immense damage Project 2025 would inflict on the country if its Christian nationalist agenda is carried out.

AU’s campaign centers on Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram of Knoxville, Tennessee, a Jewish couple who were denied the opportunity to foster and adopt a child because a taxpayer-funded, evangelical Christian foster care agency would not serve them, simply because they are Jewish.

Americans United brought the Rutan-Rams case to court on the grounds that religious freedom should not be a license to discriminate or harm others. Project 2025 targets lawsuits like this one and would expand taxpayer-funded religious discrimination.

In a dramatic video supported by digital and print ads, billboards and more, targeting Milwaukee and Chicago during the national presidential nominating conventions, Americans United helps the Rutan-Rams tell their story about the discrimination they’ve experienced that Project 2025 would impose on non-Christian and LGBTQ+ parents.

“If Project 2025 can come for us, it can come for anyone,” Gabe Rutan-Ram warns in the video, adding that the Christian nationalists behind the project “are hell-bent on making us second-class citizens.”

“It’s hard to swallow that Project 2025 acknowledges what’s happening and supports it,” added Liz Rutan-Ram. “It’s unjust.”

“The stories of Gabe and Liz Rutan-Ram put a human face on the threat posed by Project 2025,” said Lisa McCormick, a civil rights activist in New Jersey. “The discrimination these people endured puts the threat posed by Project 2025 into the larger context of a human story. Religious zealots should not be making public policies that impose their puritanical values ​​on the rest of us.”

“Project 2025 exposes the truth behind Republicans’ agenda to expand the abuse of religious freedom as a license to discriminate,” said McCormick, who challenged Sen. Bob Menendez in the 2018 Democratic primary.

“The architects of Project 2025 want to expand the abuse of religious freedom as a license to discriminate against social services, employers, schools, hospitals, and many other entities, targeting countless religious and racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, women, nonreligious, and other often marginalized groups. We are all at risk,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United. “America doesn’t need Project 2025. It needs a national recommitment to the separation of church and state — the antidote that can stop Christian nationalists in their tracks.”

Project 2025’s 900-page, 4-pound playbook reflects the agenda of white Christian nationalists who spread the lie that America was founded as a Christian nation and must remain so, and that our laws and policies must ensure that white Christians maintain their power and privilege.

Project 2025 includes Christian nationalist goals such as diverting public funds to private religious schools, rolling back rights for LGBTQ+ people, banning the most accessible form of abortion and restricting reproductive health care, creating barriers to racial justice, and redefining religious freedom as a license to discriminate.

As part of this campaign, Americans United has launched a new website to gather information about Project 2025 and its connections to the multibillion-dollar shadow network of Christian nationalist organizations and political figures seeking to undermine the separation of church and state, overthrow our democracy, and install a theocracy.

The Rutan-Rams began the foster care process to adopt a child in 2021, initially to adopt a boy from Florida. They were told they would have to complete Tennessee-mandated foster parent training and a home study certificate.

The couple contacted the only agency in their area willing to provide such services for out-of-state placements: Holston Home for Children (then Holston United Methodist Home for Children).

Holston initially told the Rutan-Rams that it would work with them. But on the day the couple was to begin their training, the agency informed the Rutan-Rams that it would not serve them because they were Jewish.

Holston said it “only provides adoption services to prospective adoptive families who share our (Christian) faith system.”

Because there was no other agency in the Knox County area that could provide the training and certification required to adopt a child from out of state, the Rutan-Rams were unable to adopt the boy from Florida.

Americans United filed the lawsuit Rutan-Ram vs. Tennessee Department of Children’s Services in January 2022 on behalf of the Rutan-Rams and six Tennesseans (four of them religious leaders) who object to the use of their tax dollars to fund religious discrimination in foster care.

A three-judge panel of the Tennessee Court of Appeals in Nashville ruled in August 2023 that the plaintiffs have standing — the right to sue. The Tennessee Supreme Court denied the state’s request for review in May 2024, clearing the way for the Rutan-Rams’ case to eventually be heard on the merits in court.

Related