India: Cockroaches, Entrance Exams and Political Disruption
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
WORT 89.9 (Madison, WI)
By Staff
FFRF Communications Director Amitabh Pal interviewed for his global affairs radio show journalist, researcher and educator Sukumar Muralidharan on the recent secular-minded, education and economic-focused student protests in India that have rocked the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi government: their genesis, ideology, tactics & impact.
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FFRF decries Trump administration’s nearly $2 billion giveaway to religious entities
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation says the Trump administration’s announcement that it will direct almost $2 billion in global funding toward faith-based organizations is outrageous.
The State Department is touting the initiative as the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based groups in more than 20 years, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars for some of the world’s largest evangelical Christian ministries. The administration announced $1.4 billion for health services delivered through faith-based and community hospitals and clinics plus $538 million in humanitarian assistance involving Samaritan’s Purse, and a consortium led by World Vision and Compassion International.
“The administration is openly restructuring American foreign assistance around religion,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Humanitarian aid should be based on humanitarian need and the ability to provide effective, secular services, not on whether an organization puts ‘faith in action.’ Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll an administration’s campaign to elevate and subsidize religion.”
The administration’s own language makes its religious favoritism impossible to miss. It celebrates the funding as a “historic” investment in faith-based groups and repeatedly identifies the religious character of recipients as a virtue. The government may contract with religiously affiliated organizations to provide secular services under appropriate safeguards. Still, it may not use public money to advance religion, subsidize evangelism or deliberately privilege religious organizations because they are religious.
The inclusion of Samaritan’s Purse, a pervasively sectarian religious outfit headed by zealous evangelist Franklin Graham, is particularly alarming.
Samaritan’s Purse is not just any old charity. It explicitly identifies itself as an evangelical Christian organization whose mission combines aid with spreading Christianity. Its own mission statement says it assists “with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ” and “serves the Church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The group says its mission is to help people in need while “proclaiming the hope of the Gospel.”
Those are constitutionally significant facts when the federal government proposes directing enormous amounts of taxpayer money through the organization.
Samaritan’s Purse also requires employees to affirm and adhere to its Statement of Faith, such as that the bible is “inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” Its employment website describes working for the group as a “calling” and “ministry,” and states that its religious beliefs determine employment eligibility.
The organization has attracted particular controversy for its anti-LGBTQ+ religious requirements. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Samaritan’s Purse faced widespread criticism when workers at its emergency field hospital in New York were required to subscribe to a statement of faith containing its religious teachings about marriage. Samaritan’s Purse defended its practice of requiring paid staff to subscribe to that statement. Graham himself has publicly attacked marriage equality and insisted that marriage is defined by “God’s laws.”
It is untenable that theTrump administration now proposes making Samaritan’s Purse one of its favored conduits for American humanitarian assistance.
“Feeding hungry people and providing medical treatment are worthy public purposes,” says Gaylor. “Preaching the gospel is not a government purpose. When an organization expressly combines humanitarian assistance with an evangelical mission, the government has a heightened obligation to ensure that not one taxpayer dollar subsidizes religious activity, proselytizing or religious discrimination.”
FFRF emphasizes that the constitutional problem is not simply that religious organizations may participate in otherwise neutral government programs. The problem is that the administration is proposing to funnel extraordinary sums of public money through ministries because those missions advance Christianity.
The danger is especially acute overseas, where recipients of American assistance may be experiencing war, famine, disease, displacement or natural disaster. People in desperate circumstances should never have to encounter government-subsidized evangelism alongside food, medicine or shelter. U.S. foreign assistance must serve people regardless of their religion or nonreligion, without using their vulnerability as an opportunity for religious outreach. Making the allocations all the more concerning is the inhumane destruction of USAID under DOGE cuts, which have already cost as many as 750,000 lives worldwide. Lancet estimates the aid defunding will take as many as 9.4 million lives by 2030.
FFRF is urging the administration to disclose the terms of every award, the safeguards separating publicly funded services from religious activities, the rules governing employment and subcontracting with federal funds, and the mechanisms that will ensure beneficiaries are never subjected to proselytizing or religious discrimination. The state/church watchdog will be filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department seeking records related to these awards, including grant agreements and funding terms, communications concerning the selection of faith-based recipients and documents detailing safeguards intended to prevent taxpayer funds from being used for religious activities, proselytizing or religious discrimination.
FFRF is also calling on Congress to investigate these awards and demand strict accounting for every taxpayer dollar. The American public deserves to know why these organizations were selected, how federal funds will be used and what protections are in place to ensure that humanitarian assistance does not become taxpayer-funded evangelism.
The United States can and should provide lifesaving assistance around the world. It does not need to finance the spread of Christianity to do so.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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FFRF: Michigan police department must remove prominent bible passage
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that the Battle Creek Police Department in Michigan take down a Christian bible verse in large lettering from its public waiting room.
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. — Matthew 5:9,” the display reads.
A concerned Battle Creek resident recently alerted the state/church watchdog to the display, explaining that encountering an explicitly Christian message inside a government law enforcement facility made them feel like an outsider.
“As an atheist . . . I was offended by witnessing a violation of the separation of church and state in the city of Battle Creek Michigan Police Department waiting room,” the resident reported to FFRF. “I personally felt discriminated against when observing the bible verse on display in a government building, concerned for the bias towards atheists and those of non-Judeo-Christian faith.”
FFRF has sent a missive to the Police Department pointing out the constitutional transgression.
“Posting a bible quote on government property fails to respect this constitutional mandate of neutrality,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Charlotte R. Gude writes to Police Chief Shannon Bagley. “This posting promotes religion over nonreligion and Christianity over all other faiths.”
People interact with and rely on law enforcement officers during some of the most urgent and vulnerable times of their lives, FFRF reminds the police chief. Battle Creek residents belonging to minority religions or with no religion at all, such as FFRF’s complainant, should not be made to feel excluded because the local Police Department promotes a particular religious group’s beliefs, implying official support for Christianity. Sectarian Christian displays marginalize community members among the 38 percent of Americans who are non-Christians, including the 31 percent of Michigan residents who are religiously unaffiliated.
“Imagine the outcry were a Quranic verse about peace posted at this Police Department. When a police department prominently displays New Testament Scripture, it sends a troubling message about whose beliefs are favored by those entrusted to safeguard citizens and enforce the law,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Every Battle Creek resident, Christian or non-Christian, religious or nonreligious, should be able to walk into their police department confident that they will be treated equally and will not be confronted with bible verses.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members across the country, including over 1,000 members in Michigan, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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An anti-trans Christian activist is furious that a reporter quoted her accurately
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A right-wing Christian activist is deeply upset that a news reporter quoted her accurately and made her sound like a deranged lunatic.
In Colorado, where Democrats have a legislative trifecta, voters can still put policy proposals on the ballot if they can collect enough signatures. A group called “Protect Kids Colorado” was formed to get three measures in front of voters in the 2026 elections. One of them would mandate life imprisonment without parole for child sex traffickers. The other two would ban trans kids from playing gender-segregated sports and ban certain kinds of “irreversible” forms of gender-affirming care for minors. (Male circumcision would still be allowed, of course, because religion.)
The founder of Protect Kids Colorado is Erin Lee, and when commenters online raised questions about some of her associations and how 9NEWS reporter Kyle Clark might cover the story, Lee lashed out against his reporting:
Kyle Clark has put out stories that I am a cult leader who covers children in blood. With zero evidence or chance for comment. So I choose not to live in fear of him. I’m not even a republican. But I do welcome anyone & everyone to support our non-partisan, common sense initiatives (democrats — and those who don’t agree with me included) … I can handle taking criticism from all sides for choosing to build a broad, non-exclusive coalition for the greater good of protecting kids.
(Lol to the idea she’s not a Republican. Apparently, when you’re Christian, you’re allowed to lie about anything.)
Anyway, if Clark has ever said those things, you’d think it’d be remarkably easy to find the tweets or news segments… but she didn’t bother sharing any of those because, of course, they don’t exist. He never said anything like it.
Clark himself denied ever saying those words about Lee being a cult leader who pours blood over children. However, he still had receipts. He responded with a clip of Lee speaking in 2021, adding “I’ve accurately quoted you as saying your ballot initiatives about trans kids are a ‘spiritual battle’ for children to ‘cover them in the blood of Jesus.’” (While she wouldn’t have been talking about the ballot initiatives at the time, she was talking about LGBTQ “ideology.”)
[We] must speak this truth over our kids to protect them from this ideology. If we all arm our children with truth and cover them in the blood of Jesus, if we stand up as Esthers and Mordecais and Deborahs and Davids, I truly believe that we will win this spiritual battle for our children.
Maybe Christians find that sort of language acceptable, but it’s fucking weird outside the context of religion, even metaphorically. But Clark is right: It’s accurate to say she wants kids covered in the blood of Jesus. If she thinks that’s a normal thing to say, let her justify it.
Clark then shared the segment he had previously run on Lee, quoting her as saying Colorado legislators were “actual demons” (see below) and showing her being interviewed on a show hosted by Christian Nationalist and self-described prophet Lance Wallnau. So if this woman who spends all her time thinking about what’s inside kids’ pants thinks she’s somehow the sane person in all this, she’s sorely mistaken.
The most amazing part about this entire exchange is that Clark didn’t have to distort Lee’s words at all to make her sound unhinged. He just shared the videos and let her prove the point. He didn’t smear her. He quoted her. She made herself look deranged.
This is why right-wing gripes about mainstream media coverage never get very far. When conservative Christians speak to other conservative Christians, they end up saying ridiculous, bigoted, unhinged things that routinely go unchecked in those spaces. Once they get outside the bubble, though, people realize how messed up they are. Just because the language is sanitized in those churches doesn’t make any of it acceptable.
In Lee’s case, she tried to call out an experienced journalist for making things up about her, only to have him share proof he didn’t make anything up at all. Maybe some of her ignorant followers will realize they’re being lied to by Lee.
Lee doesn’t want fair coverage. She wants to be able to spread lies to Christians, foment anger among voters, and have no one call her out on any of it. The problem is that she’s not the reasonable one in this battle. She’s just another Christian hater who wants everyone to think she’s protecting families when she’s really just another Christian bully going after a handful of vulnerable trans people in the state.
Here’s hoping her bigotry hits a roadblock in November.
(via Raw Story)
