All About Project 2025

Project 2025 is a comprehensive initiative developed by The Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for any administration willing to take it on.  Many people have seen or heard of it in news headlines, but not as many really understand what it actually is or why it matters. Regardless of who wins any election, the elements and ideas in Project 2025 will come up, and parents and allies of the LGBTQ+ community need to be informed. Lawyer, advocate, and strategist Rachel Laser joins Jen In the Den to discuss all the things we need to know about Project 2025.

Special Guest: Rachel Laser

Rachel Laser, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Rachel Laser became president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State in February 2018. She is the organization’s first non-Christian and female leader in its 76 year history. Rachel is a lawyer, advocate and strategist who has dedicated her career to making our country more inclusive. In her position at Americans United, Rachel oversees the organization’s work to protect freedom of conscience for all and ensure religion is not used to justify discrimination. Prior to coming to AU, Rachel worked as an educator on white privilege and racism and held positions as deputy director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, director of the Culture Program at Third Way and senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Rachel is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. She is a former board member of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Links from the Show:

• Project 2025 Resource Hub
• A central hub on Project 2025, including explainer videos: AU.org/project2025 
• Project 2025 Toolkit: Your Guide to Talking About Project 2025

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

We are going to tackle a pretty big topic today. One that everyone has seen or heard in the news, but few really understand. We are going to be discussing Project 2025 and the potential impact its ideas could have on our LGBTQ+ loved ones. This episode is not about any candidate or political party. And Mama Dragons holds no position on any candidate or party. Project 2025 is a comprehensive initiative developed by The Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for ANY administration willing to take it on. And regardless of who wins any election, the elements and ideas will continue to come up again and again and we need to be informed. In fact, many of the elements contain some of the worst of everything we have seen at a state level coming into play at a federal level. 

This is not about drama. We aren’t into histrionics or fear mongering here. We just want to put the information out on policy ideas that might impact on our communities and our loved ones. And our listeners can decide what they think and what they will do, based on the information. With such a huge topic, we feel very lucky that we have an expert to guide us through the parts that will matter most to us, Rachel Laser 

Rachel became president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State in February 2018. She is the organization’s first non-Christian and female leader in its 76-year history. Rachel is a lawyer, advocate and strategist who has dedicated her career to making our country more inclusive. In her position at Americans United, Rachel oversees the organization’s work to protect freedom of conscience for all and ensure religion is not used to justify discrimination. Prior to coming to AU, Rachel worked as an educator on white privilege and racism and held positions as deputy director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, director of the Culture Program at Third Way and senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Rachel is a graduate of Harvard Law and the University of Chicago Law School. She is a former board member of NARAL Pro-Choice America, now called Reproductive Freedom for All. Welcome, Rachel. With that resume, you can see why we’re so excited to have her here to explain this to us.

RACHEL: Thank you for having me here. I’m really looking forward to speaking with you and sort of indirectly all of your listeners.

JEN: This whole project, there’s a lot of turmoil and a lot of misinformation. So we’re excited in our little, specific lane with the project to kind of tackle it. To understand Project 2025, I think we need to start at the roots, the primary creators. Many might know that the Heritage Foundation is behind the Project, in collaboration with a lot of other organizations. Can you explain to us who the Heritage Foundation is and a little bit of their history? What sort of power they have, and what do we know about their goals?

RACHEL: Yes. So the Heritage Foundation is an ultra conservative think tank. And if you look at the who’s who of who’s been involved with the Heritage Foundation in creating Project 2025, it is the shadow network, really a billion-dollar shadow network of ultra conservative groups, many of which are run by Trump administration alums and they are all striving to create America in the image of their narrow religious worldview. And, again, we were talking about this before the podcast, it’s called a religious world view by them. But I will tell you, I know many Christians who would not define it as a Christian agenda. And I just wanted to make that clear off the bat. So it’s funded by Leonard Leo, the Koch brothers, right? That’s who’s funding these operations. Leonard Leo put these ultra-conservative justices on the Supreme Court. He’s invested millions of dollars in changing the legal landscape of our country. Obviously, with great efficacy, unfortunately. But the who’s who of groups that are working with this ultra conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, include Alliance Defending Freedom. And that group was founded by a group of televangelists and radio preachers in 1993. And they describe themselves as a Christian law firm. Again, one narrow version of Christianity some would say not Christian. They have an annual revenue of over $100,000,000. And they are the ones who are driving these cases to the Supreme Court to deprive LGBTQ people of equal rights. They also claim to have crafted the model bill that was at the heart of the Dobbs V Jackson opinion which was, of course, the opinion overruling abortion rights and Roe V Wade. The Family Research Council is another group that’s coordinating with the Heritage Foundation. They’re an anti-LGBTQ+, Anti-abortion organization with an almost $25,000,000 annual revenue. Their mission is “To serve in the Kingdom of God by championing faith, family, and freedom.” Again, I would question their definition of faith, family, and freedom, all three. We can talk about that soon. First Liberty Institute, which is a legal organization, again with almost $25,000,000 revenue. They have been really weaponizing religious freedom to deprive LGBTQ+ people of equal rights. And also, they’re the primary driver of these lawsuits that have reached the Supreme Court to siphon taxpayer dollars to private religious schools that also are allowed to discriminate and indoctrinate with taxpayer dollars. I can name even some more: Concerned Women for America, American Center for Law and Justice, which is run by Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow. Liberty University and Hillsdale College. There’s a bunch of folks who have been involved. Roger Severino was one of the major drafters of Project 2025 out of the Heritage Foundation. He is the former CEO of a group called the Becket Fund. And he worked for Heritage. And in Trump’s administration he was very involved with the Health and Human Services Department running their religious freedom aspect of Health and Human Services which was really on the hunt for where they claimed that people who were devout Christians were being discriminated against instead of marginalized people seeking health care being discriminated against. So that’s a very quick and dirty given the depth of these groups who’s who of who’s been involved with Project 2025.

JEN: I love that you separated Christianity and Christian Nationalism because I think sometimes people intertwine them when they're communicating and they’re just not remotely the same thing at all. Christianity is a faith, obviously. And Christian Nationalism is a political ideology. Not the same. Can you speak, before I leave this area, about their power. Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, do they have any power? I’ve heard people say they don’t represent anyone. They don’t even have any power.

RACHEL: I mean, they have outsized power and a lot of money. As I said, I said billion dollar shadow network. And the reason that I said that is because we actually represented the school district in the Kennedy V Bremerton School District before the Supreme Court about the praying football couch out of Washington State.

JEN: Okay.

RACHEL: Who was part of a public school and pressured players to pray to play at the 50 yard line after games. This isn’t the NFL and football. This is public school that need to be welcoming to all. Kids on the record, families had even testified that their kids felt pressured to play, coaches hold a lot of power over a kid. So we argued on behalf of the Bremerton School District. We lost before the Supreme Court because they bought into this fictional narrative that Coach Kennedy was actually praying to himself in a solitary manner which Justice Sotomayor completely deflected with the picture that she inserted into her dissent. That’s unheard of. Supreme Court opinions and dissents they’re not picture books. They’re texts. But this was really unusual because even the Appellate court had said that the district court was buying into a lie. And here we have the Supreme Court doing everything that they could to help the super conservative majority to help advance really this Christian Nationalist fiction that the coach wasn’t imposing prayer. But, anyway, back to the billion dollar shadow network. We added up the annual revenue of all the Friend of the Court briefs that came in against us. And it totalled a billion dollars. And that was as few years ago now, too. So they have a lot of power and money. And the power that they have also comes from fear. Fear is a large driver of power. It gets people to act in ways that, I guess, Mama Dragons would know. And I think in this case, you’re talking about pretty seismic changes that have been taking place in America, even over the last 15 years. So my friend, Dr. Robbie Jones, who by the way grew up Evangelical Christian in Mississippi, wrote a book called The End of White Christian America because he’s a pollster and just to portray the reality, not to argue for it, just to lay out the fact that America stopped being a majority white and Christian back in 2014. So that alone is an enormous change for the country. Then you add to that everything from the advent of Marriage Equality as the law of the land, to the first black president, the first black and southeast Asian* female vice president, now a candidate for presidency. An unprecedented number of women elected to congress. The Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, right? Let’s not forget the fear around race that really sort of centers in a lot of this fear around the changes in race. And I could keep going. But what you come out with is people who are fearful and some of whom are raging against the dying of their privilege in this country and that’s a powerful thing.

JEN: Before we dive into details, I want to stop for a second and acknowledge that the project specifically defines what a family is and isn’t. And so in addition to our focus on LGBTQ topics, I’m hoping that everybody can be aware of what they mean in this project when they talk about family. Can you tell us what a family is according to Project 2025?

RACHEL: Yeah. This Project defines family in a “Biblically-based” way. So they are arguing for a definition of marriage and family as they say is defined in The Bible. And they think that Health and Human Services and the Government should prioritize policies that, “Maintain a biblically-based – and they claim – social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” Also referred to as “Heterosexual intact marriage.” Which is, again, really interesting, trying to go back to, for the existing power structures in this country and resisting the ways that we are evolving to be a culture where everybody can live as themselves and have equal opportunity and equal freedoms and equality in general in this country. So families comprised, they say this is another quote from Project 2025, “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” It’s very obvious that they are advocating for a type of family that is against LGBTQ families in particular in those changes. Although, really, there are so many different types of families. There’s actually another podcast by this therapist, Esther Perel and she’s a relationship therapist and also has fun podcasts to listen to about relationships. And she’s not young. But I found it interesting. I was just listening to one and she was talking about something that I had never heard of called LAT coupes which is Living Apart Together.

JEN: Oh, I am familiar, just not the title.

RACHEL: Yeah. OK. And so that’s a new kind of thing. So it’s really while certainly LGBTQ families suffer from this, it’s families with single moms where the dad has been a louse and left. What is she to do except her very best to give everything she can to her children. It’s LAT families, it’s anyone who is not ultra conventional.

JEN: The Heritage Foundation has been writing these presidential mandates for a while now and one thing that I think is slightly different about this version, Project 2025, is that it has four different pillars. One focused on personnel and training and the playbook which we’ve not seen before. They’re hunting for people to automatically staff the next presidency. They’ve included Schedule F if anybody wants to look into that where they can eliminate thousands of government positions and instantly replace them with people who are loyal to any president who wants to follow this mandate. And I think all of that is super interesting. But we’re going to focus on the policy manual, that book that contains the policies that we’re concerned about.

RACHEL: Yes. Project 2025 is a 900 page play book for restructuring the entire federal government to advance the ultimate goals of Christian Nationalists. And the ultimate goals are: overthrowing American Democracy and installing a Theocracy that takes away our freedoms.

JEN: Which should be concerning to most of us.

RACHEL: Very much so. I could do a little spiel here if you would let me on church/state separation which is the antidote to Christian Nationalism.

JEN: Yes.

RACHEL: And explain why it’s so concerning to undermine church/state separation and have even a soft theocracy in this country. Church/state separation is what protects all of our freedoms to live as ourselves and believe as we choose. We traditionally have thought about it as protecting our right just to be religious in any way we want, to change our belief systems across the course of our lifetime, to concoct our own spiritual brew, or not to be religious – which a lot of younger people in particular are today, but so are some older people. But one of the ways that I’ve tried connecting the dots of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is to help people be aware of how you can’t live as yourself and be free to be yourself and express your true self when you have to live according to one narrow religious litmus test. So if you, for example, want to get married in your own way, whatever that is, even if you’re straight and cisgender or if you’re not, you can’t do that when one narrow set of religious beliefs is being imposed on you. If you find yourself with a pregnancy that you didn’t intend and you feel that for whatever reason, health, other reasons in your life about your plans to finish school, you have kids which is actually what the most common scenario is of a woman who’s seeking an abortion and you just feel like you’re not going to be able to provide to your family if you have another kid, whatever it is, right? If you have church/state separation, you can make your own decision about your own body according to your own religious or nonreligious or whatever moral belief system. If you have church/state separation, you have the right to read whatever books you want and you have the right to learn true facts about history and about science. If you have church/state separation, you have the government enforcing accurate science policy – for example, during a pandemic – And making sure that anywhere that would spread this deadly disease is limited in its openings for a period of time, including houses of worship if need be. So I could go on and on, the right to have a clean environment and to care for the environment because a lot of climate deniers shun church/state separation. And certainly the right to be queer, the right to love who you love, the right to have the gender identity that fits who you are and enables you to really reach your potential and be your best because you’re being true to yourself. All of those things depend on church/state separation. And all of those things, not coincidentally, are expressly and deliberately being undermined in this Project 2025 agenda.

JEN: I loved all of that. Thank you. So there are so many ideas and so many parts to the entire project and anybody who’s tried to open that 900 page play book and read it, it’s not like a fun read. It’s not like a novel. It’s kind of dry and boring. I think a lot of people pull out because of the dryness of the project. And there are a ton of resources out there to help us understand it. Youtube videos and articles and news reports and lots of things. But for this hour, we only get you for one hour. And so I want to narrow our focus to the items that I could find that are LGBTQ+ related. And interestingly, like I mentioned before, this part is a little bit tricky because this idea of family is woven throughout all 900 pages. But the first one I want to talk about stood out to me, probably, because my state already passed this last year. But it’s the goal of removing all language that represents orientation or gender or reproductive health out of all legislation in the entire nation. Can you talk to us about this a little bit and the impact that this has on actual people’s lives?

RACHEL: Yeah. It’s very dangerous for people’s lives because we need to be explicit, right? Even though the Supreme Court found that sex discrimination protections include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, so protections if you’re gay, lesbian, bi, or have a queer gender identity, right? A) that Supreme Court decision left open the idea that there would be religious exemption for that which is potentially a hole that you could drive a truck through. But also, throughout government and state government regulations, it’s been a long and hard-won effort by the LGBTQ community and their allies to establish protection in the area of the provisions of health care, in the area of having protections in your employment, in the area of being able to have protections in education. These really basic areas of life that many of us take for granted but that you really can’t function very well if you don’t have those protections. It’s like a friend of mine once described, “Imagine even just in the context of public accommodation, which is stores that you’re going to. Let’s say you’re a gay couple and you have a kid, and let’s even go beyond stores and let’s talk about – let’s say you work a 40-hour-week because you have young kids. You have Friday off. Friday is your day to run errands. You put all your doctor’s appointments for your kids that day. So, first you stop by the pharmacy because you want to get your prep drug which is like an HIV prevention drug, right? And the pharmacy won’t give that to you. And then you go over to the bakery because you want to get a cake celebrating your anniversary to your same-sex partner. But the bakery won’t make you the cake because you’re gay. And you show up for your appointment for the, let’s say, the pediatrician because your kid has even a best-case scenario, right? Like a healthy annual check up type of appointment. And the pediatrician finds out or has found out that you’re gay, let alone if your kid is, and they won’t serve you anymore.” And that’s just a microcosm. Or let’s say that you happen to be unlucky and have mental health illnesses or drug addiction. And you need to take advantage of social services that the government in America is supposed to provide for all. And, in particular, those who are marginalized. And I could go all “the least among us,” but they certainly aren’t the least. And you show up and you get turned away and there are stories like this of a transgender woman who showed up at a homeless shelter turned away. And these are folks who couldn’t be more vulnerable, who aren’t trying to harm anyone else, and of course this is what all the studies show, right? Transgender people using the bathrooms that are true to their gender identity are, you know, trying to just go on and go about their business. They are more likely, according to many studies, to be molested themselves than to molest. That is not what's happening. Those are not reported cases. But all of these protections that have been so intentionally fought for in city laws, state laws, in executive orders by the state, in our federal laws, all would vanish. And Project 2025 also said that they wouldn’t interpret sex discrimination protections anymore to include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity which again – but the Supreme Court has already said that you have to. So, again, with the expanded executive powers that Project 2025 simultaneously gives to the president, it’s just pretty scary stuff.

JEN: Yeah. Some of it is allowing people to discriminate if they want to. And some of it is actually forcing people to discriminate even they don’t want to. When you’re talking about a school with bathrooms and they’re forced to discriminate against kids or different situations. It’s kind of moved out of “you can” to “you have to” discriminate. And this language removal that I mentioned, it’s fascinating because it’s sort of the races that some people exist.

RACHEL: Yes. Very much so.

JEN: Yeah. Like there are men and women and we will not call them anything else. And intersex probably exist, but they need to pick a box and just jump into and stay forever sort of thing. So sometimes when you’re reading the laws it’s hard, because you’re thinking because you’re thinking, “I don’t even get where people fit in here. They’re literally, they don’t even exist in this world view that’s being created.”

RACHEL: Yes, Jen. I think that is the intention. I think it’s easier to see in some cases than others. But really, when you talk to black people in this country, or I know Jews like me, felt like this for a long time, we have struggled to be considered true Americans. And I think what Project 2025 is reestablishing is this, I’ll use the technical term, this Hegemony for white conservative Christians, or just this idea of there are certain “Real Americans,” right? And they are traditional in all the senses. And probably men are more traditional as “True Americans” even then women who are just there to kind of back them up. So if you think about who wins with an agenda like this, it’s white, ultra-conservative Christian, cisgender, straight men. But they don’t even win because anyone who is patriotic about this country, loses this country because America ceases to resemble itself. That’s one reason they don’t win. Another reason that they don’t win is because, whether they realize it or not, the cost of this white ultraconservative Christian privilege is their children and all of our children learning true facts about our history as a country. They want to deny that racism is even a thing or was a thing in this country. Denying teaching about science in this country. Denying collecting data. The agenda said “the CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women and vice versa and encourages the phenomenon of ever multiplying subjective identities.” So it’s not a win for America when our children are being denied the right to read and learn in this country, which is what they want, too.

JEN: Such an overly simplistic world view, right? Like if we don’t count them, they stop existing. If we don’t count the trans people, they’re magically zero. We counted zero of them.

RACHEL: Right.

JEN: It’s not funny. It’s not funny. I’m not trying to overly simplify it. But it just seems so ludicrous and ridiculous.

RACHEL: Well, it’s silly and it’s bound to backfire. And we all know that. I mean, you can’t shove it under the rug, right, because ultimately we’ve seen – certainly in the context of religion, I think that’s a good illustration – people are willing to even die to be able to retain and express their identities. It’s so part of who we are as human beings, right? Which is why so many more LGBTQ kids are prone to suicide, right, and are having mental health struggles. Because when your true identity is welched and when you can’t be who you are, it’s not good for you. And it’s not good for society. So it’s naïve in thinking it’s even possible and it’s damaging to our country.

JEN: So what kind of policies do we see in this 900-page monstrosity that address what happens to our kids or our loved ones who are teachers who are in schools. What happens in schools if this policy is implemented as it’s desired?

RAHEL: So one thing is public education would not resemble what we know to be public education. And, as a start, the agenda would end the department of education; it says it explicitly that it would go away. And it’s interesting because Russ Vought, who was the head of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, and the Trump administration who is one of the authors of Project 2025, was caught in one of these sort of surreptitious undercover interviews talking about Project 2025. And he said, “Well, we have to end the department of education because that’s really the department of critical race theory.”

JEN: I watched that interview.

RACHEL: It’s an interesting interview if you Google it to watch. And I think here, what we’re seeing is this reluctance to own the racist history of our country. And I just actually gave a talk in Alexandria, Virginia. I was very honored to be asked to speak at the 125th anniversary of the lynching of a 16-year-old black boy there, Benjamin Thomas. And I was asked to draw connections between the white fragility that had led to his lynching and today’s what’s called “Parental Rights Movement.” Right? That wouldn’t have even cared about Benjamin Thomas’s mom. She doesn’t count as a parent because what about her? But, and I think what’s so important to realize is the white Christian nationalist movement is claiming that when you teach about these realities of our past, that you're making white children feel bad and you’re dividing us. But really what you’re doing is you’re allowing this nation to heal and move forward, right? Because that’s there, again, all these ways in which it’s like you’re trying to erase a reality by disallowing its expression. But that’s actually not how you move past a reality. How you move past a reality is to integrate it and heal from it. So anyway, so the Department of Education is over. And that’s very bad because the Department of Education is what sort of ensures that public education is holding to its job of being high-level in terms of what it teaches our children, and being inclusive and welcoming to all of us no matter what race we are, who we love as students or in our families, what religion we practice, just welcoming to all of us. If we have a disability, that’s required. And so all the Department of Education ways of protecting this core tenet of what our country promises, and also of our democracy, because public schools are like a glue to our democracy. Not like, yes our neighborhoods are still too divided and so who’s in our public schools isn’t always diverse. But many public schools have more diversity than a lot of the walks of life of our families, right, of our churches and synagogues and mosques and our friend groups and our social media groups, etcetera. And so you learn to coexist. You learn not to deny the differences that we have as Americans but to celebrate those differences when we’re at our best and what our shared values are as a country. Because that is our glue. So all of that goes away. That’s part of Project 2025 that’s so scary. The other part of it is the way it advocates for diverting our tax dollars from public schools, which desperately need those dollars, to private, primarily religious schools. And I referenced this earlier, but it’s a really big deal because of many things. I mean, one is because tax dollars should be funding the schools that the majority of our children use. And the people who can actually take a private school voucher, on average – and afford to send their kids to a private or even private religious school are people, by and large, who could’ve afforded it in the first place. And the rest of our kids still have to go to the public schools that are losing money. Many of which – my kids went to public school. They already are starved for money for music classes or art classes. There’s already lots and lots of problems. And they need these resources, right? So we’re talking about not just depriving our public schools of taxpayer dollars, but we’re also talking about giving these dollars to schools that can discriminate and many of which do in particular against LGBTQ students and families or against teachers who might be living with someone out of wedlock. Again, these different definitions of families, are pregnant or single moms or maybe someone who’s had an abortion. And also these schools discriminate against other families that don’t share their religion. Like in Oklahoma right now, they’re trying to open the nation's first religious public school called Saint Isidore’s. It is a Catholic school run by the Archdiocese and it is trying to open this fall. Thank goodness we brought a lawsuit at Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of the most wonderful group of parents, some with LGBTQ kids, some who are Catholic themselves, some who are Christian Pastors, one who is of the Muscogee Native tribe and remembers a time from when Native kids were forced into Christian schools. But so did the Republican attorney general bring a lawsuit under church/state separation requirements in Oklahoma. So, so far, that school has stopped from opening. But the school says it’s welcoming to all, but then in the same breath says it's “going to abide by the moral code of the church.” We know what that is code for. And that “You’re welcome if you abide by the belief system of the school.” So these schools also discriminate against people who believe differently. And imagine that that’s what our public schools could look like. It's really scary.

JEN: Yeah. I hope that listeners are hearing local bills in the meantime that are coming up about books and what’s allowed in the library and bathrooms and what kind of language can be used and who’s allowed to participate in different activities and how teachers are allowed to decorate their rooms. All of these little ideas are feeding into these Project 2025 ideas. My heart always goes most to the disabled kids because that’s who ends up without any funding. I spoke with a woman yesterday who told me that families with disabled kids can learn to fend for themselves. Which was heartbreaking to hear out of an actual person’s mouth. But all of these things, when we’re hearing about education savings accounts, or voucher programs – they name it different things in different places – but the goals of all of those things are to take money out of these public school that represent our pluralistic ideas as a nation, right, and funnel them into these religious academies. It just hurts my heart.

RACHEL: And I’ll add really quickly, Jen, before we move on from that one, that Saint Isidore’s has reserved the right to discriminate against kids with disabilities. So there you go. Just like you were saying. and it’s just almost too much for a Mama heart to take.

JEN: Right.

RACHEL: Yeah. And from what I know about Christianity, this just seems so unchristian. But also, the other aspect of what this private school voucher movement is about that I need to name here is evading the mandate of Brown versus Board of Education for schools to desegregate. And this is written about in books. I have a book here – I’m just looking for the name of it. I always forget but it’s an excellent one. I’ll find it in a minute, Overturning Brown, it’s called, by Suitts. S-U-I-T-T-S, by Steve Suitts. And it really traces that history of white Christians wanting to find a way to take their kids out of these integrated public schools and send them to white Christian academies that would still be funded by the government. And so they deliberately scrubbed their language of anything to do with race. And that made it about “school choice,” right? But the underpinnings were absolutely rooted in what they couldn’t stay anymore soon. Right after some of these cases had gone to the supreme court and you were going to lose your tax exemption if you discriminated against black and brown students. And it stopped being acceptable to say that that was your motivation. And so they came up with this coded, new, and strategic approach for doing the same thing. And it’s true that still the primary users of the money for private school vouchers and the students who go to these private schools, are white children. So I think it’s important to point out the racist underpinnings of the private school voucher movement that is incredibly advanced and endorsed by Project 2025.

JEN: Every time I hear about that “school choice,” it just gets me all prickly. So every time LGBTQ people are targeted by harmful legislation across the nation, people come to me and ask questions. And inevitably the questions sound like: “They can’t do that? Can they do that? How is that legal? Can they even do this?” And my question to you is, how is any of this stuff in Project 2025 legal?

RACHEL: That’s a great question. Well, firstly, one answer is, who said it’s legal? And I think it’s really important for everyone to be aware of that. And if, heaven forbid, this ever happened, we would have to fight it tooth and nail on every count. And much of it is not legal. The problem is Project 2025 is so scary because of the ways it would strive to reshape the government to try to make it legal. So from a personnel point of view, the idea that there could be this mass firing of personnel and all these appointments of political people to fill these career positions – basically getting rid of anyone who doesn’t toe the line, right? So then all the sudden, the people who are the decision makers are aligned with this really scary agenda, right? So that’s one really scary way that they could try to make it “Legal”. You know, another is Russ Vought, of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, wrote about “executive power to curb the excesses of federal agencies' dangerous administrative elite by expanding the prerogative of presidential authority in every facet of the federal government's operation.” So that’s super scary because in America, one of the things that creates our democracy and that it relies on is a balance of power between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches. But this is some weird effort to designate more power to the executive branch. So then you get into, well, “what could the executive branch, through executive orders, give itself?” But when the executive branch is then in cahoots with courts that are basically co-opted and corrupted by the millions and billions of dollars of, like, Leonard Leo, right? And sort of in lock step with this agenda. And if you can imagine the decision makers in all these throughout our government, if they are also in lock-step, then we really face a dangerous situation because the checks and balances won’t work, right? And there could even be this granting of outsized executive authority that’s basically again turning what was a democracy into something else. More of an autocracy, more of a theocracy. Very dangerous stuff.

JEN: I’m so fascinated – and I say this as a negative – but fascinated by this idea that it becomes legal when a president says it, it becomes legal by default just because the president said it. And we know, anybody who’s reading through this stuff knows that you mentioned the Department of Education going away, but also NOAA gone, Department of Justice totally restaffed, everything in the immigration, everything is restaffed so all the people who might say to a president, “No. We can’t do that. That’s illegal.” They’ve been replaced, or the goal is to replace them, with loyalists who when the president says do something, they say “Yes, sir.” And then you gotta worry about the legality later. And again, I say fascinating as a negative, I don’t want anyone to think I’m saying that as a positive. I can’t help but notice when we’re talking about these things that it’s not new. None of these ideas are new. It’s not like somebody suddenly invented these ideas in the last couple of years. A lot of the ideas are already being legislated across the states. We’re seeing things pop up in the nation, hearing rulings support it come down from the Supreme Court. But we’re just recently hearing about it in loud ways, the idea of Project 2025 being spoken from platforms, political campaigns, in comment sections on social media. Why are people suddenly hearing about it and feeling alarmed where maybe it’s been in the works for 20 years and nobody really cared?

RACHEL: Well, I think it’s because Christian Nationalism is so emboldened today that everybody is just saying the quiet parts out loud. And it’s happening with this agenda. I mean, I remember when I first started as the president of Americans United. It was 2018. And something had just emerged called ‘Project Blitz.” And Project Blitz was like the state arm of the Christian Nationalist movement creating model bills – over 20 of them – that they were putting out about getting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and “In God we trust” everywhere. But it went all the way through to the use of religious freedom to discriminate, right? That was kind of the ultimate goal. And we shined a light on projects and they actually went under, back into the dark. And they hid away. And everything disappeared from their website. And it’s sort of like what’s happened with abortion which is, yes, Roe V. Wade protected abortion rights for 50 years almost. My generation X and your generation on down, folks didn’t have to think about the fact that abortion bans were religiously motivated. Because it was like abortion is about privacy and no one was saying the private parts out loud because we used to live in a country where a Catholic running for president had to work hard – JFK – to give his bonafides about church/state separation. That was like a test. But today, the combination of the fear factor that we talked about earlier with what the Supreme Court has advanced in the past ten years, right – instituting one narrow religious viewpoint on abortion, diverting more funds from public to private schools, allowing in a public school a coach to pressure his players to pray or sing. The City of Boston to display a Christian flag from their City hall flag post. There was another example that I wanted to give that I will think of in a moment, forcing the state of Maine to fund religious education against their will. Again, not permitting anymore, back to your point, but forcing. If they were funding private education, they would have to fund private religious education. So the supreme Court, together with the former Trump Administration, did really embolden Christian Nationalism in this country. Combine that with the fear factor and it’s just like it’s never been before in my lifetime. There’s Project 2025 popping up. There are laws across the states, from Idaho to West Virginia, from Florida to North Dakota, that are allowing public schools to replace certified school counselors with chaplains, that are requiring classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, one version of them by the way, King James Bible, so that kids will read and venerate them. That abortion bans exist in over 20 states in this country. LGBTQ bans on saying gay, bans on books that even have LGBTQ characters in them, and this demonization of transgender people which is truly terrible. Which, by the way, Project 2025 really sort of drills into and we can talk more about that, but that is what we’re witnessing today, this pure emboldenment. In Missouri, we sued the state, challenging their abortion ban because they said all the quiet parts about the religious motivations out loud. And even put into the language of their abortion ban that “God almighty is the author of life and that life begins at conception,” which is one narrow religious point of view because religions like mine, Judaism, don’t believe that. So it’s a baseline. It’s one narrow baseline about abortion and when life begins. Again, all over the place the laws that are springing up in the states, Project 2025, it exemplifies the overreach of this white Christian Nationalist movement today. And the only good news about that, and I think this has been almost like a tenor, Jen, and what you’ve been saying, it’s like you’ve been calling it simplistic and it’s like such overreach that there is a piece of good news in that, which is there is a backlash happening against it. And it is exuding its un-Americanness and it is also against the majority of the people and the will of the people, because Project 2025 is even rooting the power of this country in God rather than in the people, right? And that’s not what America is about. That’s not what our constitution says. And so it’s causing an uproar, as it should. And I’m so glad that you’re showcasing it and we’re talking about it because what studies as recently as this summer show, is 76% of the nation, at least as of this study that we’re aware of in early July, hadn’t heard of Project 2025. But when people do, they’re almost always against it when they learn what's in it. And that’s really the good news and the silver lining.

JEN: So, I cannot let you go before I ask what I think is probably the most important question for us as listeners, for the 11,000 Mama Dragons and our friends and our neighbors and our spouses. When we see these ideas come up in federal or local legislation – sometimes if it’s a presidential executive order you don’t have a lot of room at the beginning – but sometimes it starts as actual legislative attempts. What do we do about it? How do we fight back?

RACHEL: Well, there are all sorts of answers and I’ll give you sort of a menu of them. But I think that there’s one that’s even the most important which is: you’ve got to use your voice to show up in some way to express your disapproval. I remember sitting at a, I’m in Washington D.C. and been part of a lot of D.C. Coalitions, and I just remember when I learned that lesson from a real veteran in lobbying who said, “Our opponents are asking their passionate advocates to call Congressional offices or their lawmakers’ offices every day. And it could be the same person who calls every day. But what the staff person communicates to their boss, who’s the lawmaker, typically are the numbers. This many people called on this side of your constituents. This many people called on the other side.” So you’ve got to be determined. And sometimes the most effective work is the most boring work, which is to do the same thing again and again, which is to contact your lawmaker and tell them that, as someone who is part of their constituency, you disagree with that policy. Or let’s not forget the other side, you agree with something and when your lawmaker takes a step that you do agree with, thank them. Thank them, right? So one thing is just the sheer reaching out, showing up, creating noise. I think it’s really effective if you are part of a faith community to say that because people assume that people who are religious are on one side of the issue. It’s like the baseline is ultraconservative Christian, basically. That’s the baseline of religious, who’s got religion. So if you’re Jewish, you don’t really count. If you’re Muslim, you don’t really count. If you’re non-religious you don’t really count. If you’re non-Abrahamic faith, you don't really count. And if you’re the wrong kind of Christian, you don’t really count. And so it’s really important. I think there’s moral weight still that is attached to being a person of faith. Again, I think that’s an unfair baseline to people who are non-religious and who have plenty of morality. But I think it’s still important to include when you call that you are a person of faith or you belong to whatever church in the community if you do. And I think that’s powerful as well. I would also say, in terms of what you can do, don’t ever lose hope. And that sounds like such a small step, but that’s what our opponents want us to do. They want us to just feel like it’s useless. I can have no power in a state like Idaho, what does my voice matter? But what we’re seeing around the country, in particular with these incredible ballot initiatives on abortion rights, is that when people join together and then they speak up, someone hears them and says, “Hey. I’m a person of faith, but that's what I believe too.” And so make sure that you are holding onto hope. And now I’ll say, apart from just contacting the lawmaker's office, use whatever platforms you have. So, for example, if you can write a letter to the editor or if you’re a writer and you want to write an op-ed to your local paper, that’s incredible. And we have plenty of resources if you go to AU.ORG/PROJECT2025.

JEN: We’ll have that in the show notes for sure.

RACHEL: Excellent. So you can find resources there. But also, if your jam isn’t writing but you just want to bring a group of people together, or have a tea with a group of girl friends and bake your favorite thing. And the people you love to hang out with and just say, “You know what, today I’m going to do my best to sit in front of my computer and just talk a little bit with you about what I’m learning about this project so that you can do the same with everyone in your community.” That’s wonderful. That counts. So it’s just don’t underestimate the power of your creativity and the power of your ability to express yourself however you do best, because that really matters today. And the reality is we have the power of the people on our side and we also have the power of the constitution on our side, and the DNA of America on our side and that’s really powerful.

JEN: I love that. I am somebody who can march, but I can’t make signs. So I love the people who can make signs and hand them to me so I can hold them when I march because I can’t be artistic.

RACHEL: Exactly. If you’re an artist, design a t-shirt.

JEN: Yeah. The people who bring the wagon full of water, I love those people because I never thought of it.

RACHEL: And snacks.

JEN: Yeah. The people with the cookies are my favorite. If you’re too shy to speak in a legislative hearing, show up with your t-shirt for the people who have to speak. There’s so many ways we can do it. and of course, I have to add my slogan, ALWAYS VOTE. Please vote. Please register and vote because if the 40% of the nation that doesn’t vote at all would start voting, it would make a pretty substantial difference.

RACHEL: I’m so glad you said that. And I should’ve said it too. And it’s really part of hope, too, right?

JEN: Yeah.

RACHEL: Show up, even if you think it doesn’t matter, show up. Because even if, let’s say, you know that your vote won’t ultimately sway the bottom line in your state, it might be counted as part of the overall vote and showcase where the numbers are in the country. And sometimes those two don’t equate. So there’s so many ways that your vote is powerful. Not to mention, bring your kids to vote. My kids are now young adults. But I always brought my kids to vote and it always made me feel like crying. I got almost emotional because I felt like this is our democracy at its purest and it’s actually a really powerful emotional experience to vote. And let your kids be part of it. I really believe that will make them more likely to be civically engaged. Bring them to volunteer with you. Bring them to vote. Bring them to a rally if that's your jam. Just bring them with you. It’s powerful.

JEN: I love that. We do the kitchen table voting with our absentee ballots so everyone can chat. I know people feel powerless. I know people feel hopeless. I know people feel like they can’t make a difference. But there’s so many little things that we can do that are exciting.

RACHEL: I love it.

JEN: I want to thank you abundantly, not only for your conversation with us here but for all of the work that you do in protecting all of our rights to practice our own religious beliefs and our own spiritual ways in the nation. But also thank you for chatting with me. I’m obviously very passionate about this. My friends are getting annoyed with my Marco Polos and my posts about Project 2025. So I appreciate, greatly, you coming and sharing this conversation with me.

RACHEL: Well, I appreciate you and all the work that you’re doing on behalf of all of us and on behalf of this country. Because whether you’re a part of the LGBTQ community or religious minority community or you’re a woman that wants to have reproductive freedom or you’re worried about the environment or you care about our public schools and our democracy, in the end what you’re fighting for is really for each and every one of us and that’s how change is made. I really respect you and thank you for doing what you do.

JEN: You’re so awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us here In the Den. While we have you, we want to let you know about the inaugural LUV Conference coming up this October 18th and 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference is all about learning and connecting and creating a more supportive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Get more information at www.luvwithoutlimits.org . That’s L-U-V- without limits.org. Or find the link in the show notes under the links from the show. We hope to see you there. 

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*Kamala Harris identifies as South Asian