FFRF disburses more than $17,000 to First in the Family student essay winners
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is proud to announce the 11 top winners and nine honorable mentions of the 2026 David Hudak Memorial First in the Family Student Essay Competition. FFRF has paid out a total of $17,650 in award money for the contest this year.
Students who will be first in their family to attend either a two- or four-year college or university and who are ages 17–21 were asked to write on the topic of “Why white supremacy goes hand in hand with Christian nationalism.”
Winners, their ages, the colleges or universities they are attending and the award amounts are listed below. (FFRF seeks to distribute essay scholarship monies to a higher number of students, so ties are not regarded in the typical tie fashion.) The winning essays are linked below.
FIRST PLACE
Nyla Woods, 21, University of Kansas, $3,500.
SECOND PLACE
Isaiah Lopez Ruiz, 21, Paradise Valley Community College, $3,000.
THIRD PLACE
Anastasia Gonzalez, 19, Harvard University, $2,500.
FOURTH PLACE
Angelle Jean-Pierre, 18, Howard University, $2,000.
FIFTH PLACE
Antonio Drain, 18, University of Central Oklahoma, $1,500.
SIXTH PLACE
Carina Reyes-Ortiz, 18, West Chester University, $1,000.
SEVENTH PLACE
Cha’Miah Phoenix, 19, UCLA, $750.
EIGHTH PLACE
Yusef Houssein, 19, Saint Joseph University, $500.
NINTH PLACE (tie)
Jayda Gaither, 18, East Carolina University, $400.
Samani Ismail, 18, University of Berkeley, $400.
TENTH PLACE
Laila Coutou, 20, New York University, $300.
HONORABLE MENTION ($200 each)
Mariana Catalan, 18, University of Houston
Christine Cowing, 18, Montana State University – Billings
Brooklyn Dosen, 21, Cochise College
Cash Guello, 18, University of North Georgia
Gabrielle Horsley, 18, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
Jackson Manis, 18, University of Texas
Iman Merchent, 17, University of Texas
Kira Saintvil, 18, Rochester Institute of Technology
Kason Steward, 18, Sacramento State University
FFRF thanks Lisa Treu for managing the infinite details of this (and FFRF’s other essay competitions). FFRF would also like to thank our volunteer and staff readers and judges, including: Don Ardell, Dan Barker, David Chivers, Wrenna Fine, Jon Galehouse, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Ricki Grunberg, Susan Haines, Linda Josheff, Kevin Kirby, Jeffrey LaVicka, Sammi Lawrence, Robert Leonhard, Tom Ludwinski, Katya Maes, David Malcolm, Tori Mizerak, Jason Mosebach, Henry Mongrain, Chris O’Connell, Andrea Osburne, Brooks Rimes, Kathy Rogers, Rose Mary Sheldon, PJ Slinger, Michelle Smith and Matthew Woodruff.
This contest is named for the late David Hudak, an FFRF member who left a bequest to generously fund a student essay contest.
FFRF has offered essay competitions to students of color (now first in the family to attend college) since 2016. It has also offered essay contests open to all college students since 1979, college-bound high school seniors since 1994, grad students since 2010 and one for law students since 2019.
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.
The post FFRF disburses more than $17,000 to First in the Family student essay winners appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
FFRF’s ‘Secular Spotlight’ charts an ex-pastor’s journey to nonbelief
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The latest episode of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Secular Spotlight” YouTube show tells the story of former Evangelical Pastor Timmy Gibson’s journey to atheism.
Gibson joins FFRF Co-President Dan Barker to discuss his climb from decades in Christian ministry to atheism. They also talk about faith healing, prayer, morality, meaning, near-death experiences — and how Gibson found purpose and fulfillment outside of Christianity.
“My pursuit of truth is what led me away,” Gibson states. “It was like I was finding less and less that I could teach with conviction out of the bible. And pretty soon it just got to the point where I’m like, ‘I don’t believe any of this, I can’t do this anymore.’”
You can catch this episode of “Secular Spotlight” on FFRF’s YouTube channel, as well as by watching on your smart TV after downloading FFRF’s free app, Freethought TV, which also highlights FFRF’s other video programming. Our previous episodes include a deep dive into the legacy of Robert G. Ingersoll, one of America’s most important freethinkers, and a discussion with Uncloseted Media Editor-in-Chief Spencer Macnaughton about his revealing interview with Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson (a mentor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth). Make sure you’re subscribed to FFRF’s YouTube channel for all the latest updates!
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 40,000 members across the country, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
The post FFRF’s ‘Secular Spotlight’ charts an ex-pastor’s journey to nonbelief appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Freethought Radio – August 27, 2026
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
Margaret Downey, president of the Thomas Paine Memorial Association, tells us what you can do to help erect a memorial statue to America’s forgotten Founder Thomas Paine in Washington, D.C.
The post Freethought Radio – August 27, 2026 appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
FFRF warns DOJ seeks to force taxpayers to fund religious proselytizing
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is condemning a sweeping new Department of Justice legal opinion that seeks to dramatically expand the ability of religious groups to use federal taxpayer dollars for all sorts of religious activities.
The Aug. 25 memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, titled “Constitutionality of Religious Restrictions on the Use of Federal Funds,” claims that federal restrictions preventing taxpayer dollars from being used for explicitly religious purposes are presumptively unconstitutional. The opinion essentially dictates that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause trumps the Establishment Clause, which Thomas Jefferson famously explained builds “a wall of separation between church and state.”
“The First Amendment does not require the government to bankroll prayer, preaching or proselytizing, and FFRF will vigorously oppose efforts to turn federal programs into taxpayer-funded ministries,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Faith-based organizations are free to practice and promote their religion, but religious freedom does not come with a right to have taxpayers pick up the tab.”
The opinion focuses on federal programs administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, including programs involving child care, substance abuse treatment, welfare services and other social services. Existing federal laws still restrict the use of direct government funding for “sectarian worship, instruction, or proselytization.” HHS regulations require explicitly religious activities to be offered separately in time or location from federally funded services and make participation voluntary.
The memo complains, for example, that a church operating a federally supported soup kitchen cannot conduct communal prayer as part of the taxpayer-funded meal service. Nor can a religious organization providing federally funded employment or family programs incorporate religious teachings into those programs. The Office of Legal Counsel contends that those safeguards discriminate on the basis of religion.
Those implications extend far beyond soup kitchens.
The opinion states that religious recipients cannot constitutionally be required to “forgo[], segregat[e], or bifurcat[e] their religious activities” in order to participate in a generally available federal program. It argues that a secular organization may promote its values through a federally funded sex education program, for example, so a religious provider must likewise be permitted to teach its religious views about sexuality.
Perhaps most shocking, the memo offers the example of a government-funded STEM program. While the government could limit funding to STEM education, the opinion asserts that it would still be “obligated to allow religious providers to integrate their faith into STEM instruction,” including by teaching “the relationship between faith and science or the theological basis for mathematics.”
“That example lays bare just how extreme this theory is,” says FFRF Deputy Legal Director Liz Cavell. “Equal eligibility for a government benefit is one thing. Claiming a constitutional right to convert the government-funded program itself into a vehicle for religious teaching is something else entirely.”
The opinion relies heavily on the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, which prohibit governments from excluding religious institutions from certain generally available public benefit programs. But the DOJ opinion goes significantly further. Carson, for instance, involved tuition assistance reaching religious schools through private parental choice. The memo acknowledges that distinction but declares that the mechanism by which government funding reaches a religious institution is “constitutionally irrelevant.”
The memo similarly attempts to sweep aside longstanding Supreme Court precedent recognizing special Establishment Clause concerns when the government makes direct payments to religious institutions. Rather than point to a Supreme Court decision expressly overruling that precedent, the Office of Legal Counsel calls the traditional distinction between direct and indirect government funding “fruit of the poisoned Lemon tree.” (This is a reference to the Lemon Test, which the current Supreme Court recently abandoned and which declared that to be constitutional, a government action or program required a secular purpose, should neither advance nor inhibit religion and must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion.)
FFRF warns that abandoning that distinction between direct and indirect funding will transform federal social service programs into government-financed vehicles for evangelism. FFRF identifies serious threats to social service recipients:
• The programs implicated by the opinion serve some of society’s most vulnerable people. A person seeking food, shelter, child care, suicide prevention or addiction treatment should not have to navigate taxpayer-funded religious exercises to obtain government-supported assistance.
• The memo targets protections against religious discrimination. It would erase existing HHS rules prohibiting recipients of direct federal assistance from discriminating against beneficiaries because of their religion, religious beliefs, refusal to hold a religious belief or refusal to participate in a religious practice.
• The opinion objects to a federal child care provision barring discrimination, characterizing those protections as burdens on religious exercise. Currently, certain heavily government-funded religious providers may not discriminate on the basis of religion in specified employment and admissions decisions.
Religious organizations could increasingly claim both a constitutional right to conduct religious activities with taxpayer funding and a religious right to discriminate while administering publicly funded programs.
The opinion’s historical analysis is equally troubling. The memo invokes early federal programs that financed Christian missionaries working among Native Americans, including federal support for clergy, religious instruction and church construction. These shameful programs are hardly evidence of a settled constitutional tradition permitting government-funded religion; they were part of a broader federal policy using Christianity to suppress Indigenous religion, peoples and cultures, and advance explicitly sectarian aims that are constitutionally indefensible today.
Most immediately, the opinion could pave the way for HHS to stop enforcing statutes Congress enacted. The Office of Legal Counsel concludes that the religious restrictions are unconstitutional and severable from their underlying programs, and expressly contemplates HHS adopting a policy of nonenforcement and reporting that decision to Congress.The threat also extends beyond HHS. The opinion repeatedly frames its conclusions broadly, declaring that restrictions on the anticipated religious use of funds in “generally available federal funding programs” are presumptively unconstitutional.
FFRF will closely monitor HHS for changes to its regulations, grant requirements and beneficiary protections, as well as any decision to refuse enforcement of existing federal law.
“James Madison, the primary architect of our godless Constitution, famously (and successfully) argued that citizens should not be forced to pay ‘even three pence’ in support of religious establishments. He’d be rolling in his grave at the memo’s outrageous distortion of constitutional law,” Gaylor concludes.
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.
The post FFRF warns DOJ seeks to force taxpayers to fund religious proselytizing appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
New Jersey didn’t ban prayer outside abortion clinics, but Christians are lying about it anyway
This newsletter is free and goes out to over 25,000 subscribers, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can subscribe via Patreon or the Subscribe button below! You can also make one-time donations through Venmo, CashApp, or PayPal.
Conservative Christians, faced with the prospect of not being allowed to get away with anything they want, are now falsely claiming New Jersey has made prayer illegal.
(They have not. Shocking, I know.)
Here’s what actually happened: Last Thursday, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law that, among other things, makes it a crime to get in the way of anyone accessing or providing reproductive or gender-affirming health care. It’s a necessary way to punish anyone who physically blocks access to a health care facility or intimidates patients, especially in the face of the Trump administration already doing everything it can to make it harder for people to get the care they need.
The word “physically” is key there. The bill goes after anyone who tries to “inflict bodily injury” on a patient, obstructs their path into the building, intimidates or threatens staffers through force, etc.
But because women will be able to access abortion care without having to worry about conservative Christians blocking their path, those religious zealots are now lying to their supporters about what this bill does.
It may have started with this irresponsible bit of projection from one right-wing activist, who said that prayers could be construed as a form of intimidation, therefore this bill would prevent protesters from praying outside clinics:
“Peaceful sidewalk counseling, prayer, holding signs, or simply offering help and alternatives outside a facility can easily be labeled ‘intimidation’ by someone who claims to feel threatened, leaving pro-life advocates open to criminal charges that are difficult to disprove and chilling constitutionally protected expression,” said Marie Tasy, executive director of the anti-abortion group New Jersey Right to Life.
All of that is an exaggeration. Protesters still have their First Amendment rights even if patients and pro-choice allies don’t like it. This bill doesn’t prevent the prayers or legal protests.
In fact, that’s exactly what the governor’s office said:
… Maggie Garbarino, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said peaceful prayer is protected under the law.
“This legislation protects patients and providers from threats to their safety, and defends the fundamental freedom to make personal healthcare decisions without fear or intimidation. Nothing in this law prevents lawful, peaceful protest or the exercise of constitutionally protected speech,” Garbarino said in a statement to NJ.com.
“What is not protected is violence, threats, intimidation, physical obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with someone receiving or providing reproductive healthcare,” she added.
Case closed. But being honest about this legislation doesn’t help Christian Right groups with fundraising, nor does it help zealots rile up their base.
That’s why the Christian group Intercessors for America sent emails to supporters over the weekend claiming “They Just Made Prayer Illegal,” directing people to a petition that included even more blatant lies about what the New Jersey bill does (emphases theirs):
New Jersey just signed the “shield law bill” that criminalizes prayer outside of abortion clinics statewide. This chilling eradication of the First Amendment for believers is now happening in New Jersey—it could be coming to a state near you. IFA is providing a way for you to make your voice heard to protect the First Amendment for people of faith. Sign the petition today to stop making prayer illegal and then be sure to pray for those leaders who represent you in government to protect religious freedom and freedom of speech.
Again, none of that is true. Prayer has not been criminalized. The First Amendment isn’t under attack through this law. And signing this petition won’t accomplish anything except getting your email address added to a Christian mailing list that will never stop spamming you.
But that group wasn’t alone.
The same lie was spread by anti-abortion activist Lila Rose who told her gullible followers that the bill is “effectively preventing Christians from praying outside abortion facilities,” adding that “No person should be punished for praying for the unborn.”
She’s lying. No one’s stopping Christians from praying outside health clinics. No one’s punishing them. Unless they’re praying in front of the door to a clinic, preventing someone from getting inside, they are still free to waste all the time and energy that they want. But notice she used that weasel word “effectively,” suggesting that even she knew prayer wasn’t under attack.
The website LifeNews.com didn’t even bother with that. Their headline made it sound like the New Jersey law banned prayer, period.
In fact, a lot of influential right-wing social media users put out statements saying the law CAN or COULD punish protesters. (Like Rose, a lot of them used the word “effectively.”) They’re equivocating because they know damn well the law doesn’t do what they’re saying, but they don’t care. They have to rile up their extremely ignorant base. By the way, good luck finding any prominent conservative Christians admitting that the law doesn’t do what these zealots are suggesting.
It’s honestly laughable to listen to these people whine because just think about what they’re saying. Can the prayers of anti-abortion protesters only be heard by God if they’re within a few feet of an abortion clinic? Are they admitting their God is hard of hearing? Or that their prayers aren’t as powerful as we thought? Can God not hear them if they’re praying against abortion from home? Apparently not! Who knew their God was this weak?
None of that logic, however, led any of these people to admit the law doesn’t actually prevent peaceful prayers and protests.
So why are they lying? Because they’re conservative Christians who aren’t interested in facts. These are the same people who overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the past three elections despite all the cognitive dissonance and blatant lies. They lie because nothing in their faith convincingly taught them lying is bad. They lie because the truth gets in the way of their preferred narrative. They lie because they know, deep down, they’re the bad guys in this entire situation but they don’t want to admit it.
They’re also lying because this bill protects the rights of patients to get the health care they need from the doctors they want to see, and the Christian Right has spent years interfering with that bond. They see the space outside health care clinics as places where vulnerable patients can be confronted, shamed, frightened, and harassed, all while using euphemisms like “sidewalk counseling.” In New Jersey, lawmakers said that patients deserve to enter those facilities without threats or obstruction, so now these activists are screaming persecution. They don’t actually give a shit about prayer because even they know their prayers are ineffective. They just want to impose their will on patients who want nothing to do with them. This law prevents them from harassing people, and conservative Christians can’t handle being told “no.”
So they lie.
That’s why conservatives can’t honestly describe this law. If they admitted that peaceful prayer, even outside clinics, remains perfectly legal, their entire martyrdom narrative would collapse. Then they might have to confront reality: that they’re actually upset because the law prevents violence and intimidation and physical obstruction… and that’s exactly what they want to do. Saying New Jersey banned prayer is much better for fundraising than saying New Jersey won’t let us terrorize women, even though only the latter is accurate.
By the way, on Wednesday, the right-wing group 40 Days For Life announced that it would pay the legal bills for any Christians arrested under this law:
“Prayer is not a crime. Holding a sign is not intimidation. Offering a woman help is not coercion,” the group’s CEO Shawn Carney told The Post. “This law is designed to scare people of faith off the sidewalks outside abortion facilities by creating the constant threat of prosecution and costly lawsuits.”
“We will not be intimidated,” he went on. “If the state tries to weaponize this law against constitutionally protected speech, our Institute of Law & Justice will be there to defend them at no cost.”
Carney’s group stressed that the protesters must have been engaged in peaceful activity in order to get its legal support.
It’s a brilliant PR tactic. They get free press and they won’t have to spend a single cent on any legal bills since, again, peaceful prayers aren’t being targeted by this bill, and everyone knows that except for willfully ignorant Christians.
