Americans United for Separation of Church and State launched a national campaign to put a human face on the immense harm that Project 2025 would inflict on the country if its Christian Nationalist agenda is implemented.
AU’s campaign centers around Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram of Knoxville, Tennessee, a Jewish couple denied the opportunity to foster and adopt a child because a taxpayer-funded, evangelical Christian foster care agency refused to serve them solely because they are Jews.
Americans United took the Rutan-Rams’ case to court because religious freedom should not be a license to discriminate or harm others. Project 2025 targets lawsuits like this and would expand taxpayer-funded religious discrimination.
In a dramatic video, backed with digital and print ads, billboards, and more, and centered on Milwaukee and Chicago during the national presidential nominating conventions, Americans United is helping the Rutan-Rams tell their story of the discrimination they experienced and that Project 2025 would inflict 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 “hellbent on trying to make us second-class citizens.”
“To know Project 2025 recognizes what’s happening and is supporting it, it’s really hard to swallow,” Liz Rutan-Ram added. “It’s an injustice.”
“Gabe and Liz Rutan-Ram’s story puts a human face on the threat Project 2025 poses,” said Lisa McCormick, a human rights activist in New Jersey. “The discrimination these people endured puts the threat Project 2025 poses into the bigger context of a human story. Religious fanatics should not make public policy that imposes their puritanical values on the rest of us.”
“Project 2025 reveals the truth behind of agenda of Republicans who would expand the abuse of religious freedom as a license to discriminate,” said McCormick, who challenged Senator Bob Menendez in the 2018 Democratic primary.
“The Project 2025 architects want to expand the abuse of religious freedom as a license to discriminate to social service agencies, employers, schools, hospitals and many other entities and turn it against countless religious and racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, women, the 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.”
Project 2025’s 900-page, 4-pound playbook reflects the agenda of white Christian Nationalists who advance the lie that America was founded as and must remain a Christian nation, and that our laws and policies must ensure that white Christians hold onto power and privilege.
Project 2025 includes Christian Nationalist goals of diverting public funds to private religious schools, rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people, banning the most accessible form of abortion and limiting reproductive health care, erecting roadblocks 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 compile information about Project 2025 and its connections to the billion-dollar shadow network of Christian Nationalist organizations and political powerbrokers seeking to undermine church-state separation, overthrow our democracy and install a theocracy.
The Rutan-Rams began the process of fostering to adopt a child in 2021, initially seeking to adopt a boy from Florida. They were told they needed to complete Tennessee-mandated foster-parent training and a home-study certification.
The couple contacted the only agency in their area that was willing to provide those services for out-of-state placements – Holston Home for Children (then called Holston United Methodist Home for Children).
Holston initially told the Rutan-Rams that it would work with them. But the day the couple was scheduled to start their training, the agency informed the Rutan-Rams it wouldn’t serve them because they are Jewish.
Holston said it “only provide[s] adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our [Christian] belief system.”
Because there was no other agency in the Knox County area that would provide the required training and certification for the adoption of an out-of-state child, the Rutan-Rams were unable to adopt the boy from Florida.
Americans United filed the lawsuit Rutan-Ram v. Tennessee Department of Children’s Services in January 2022 on behalf of the Rutan-Rams and six Tennessee residents (four of them faith leaders) who object to their tax dollars being used to fund religious discrimination in foster care.
A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee at Nashville ruled in August 2023 that the plaintiffs have standing – the right to sue. The Tennessee Supreme Court in May 2024 denied the state’s application for review, paving the way for the Rutan-Rams’ case finally to proceed on the merits in the trial court.
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