Every year at this time Americans United takes a look back at the past 12 months and compiles the Top Ten high points for our organization. We’ll be reviewing them over the next two days; here are the first five:
AU hosted events all over the country in 2024, many featuring AU CEO & President Rachel Laser. Some highlights included a July 21 event at Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ Church in Oklahoma City titled “Unmasking Christian Nationalism”; an Aug. 8 event at Shiloh Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., where Laser spoke about the dangers of the “parental rights” movement; a pair of events near Buffalo, N.Y., in September at Temple Beth Zion and the Masjid An-Noor mosque on Christian Nationalism and Project 2025; and a Nov. 21 post-election analysis in Los Angeles.
In addition, AU chapters and allied groups screened the documentary “Bad Faith,” a stark warning about Christian Nationalism. AU staff members appeared in dozens of other in-person and virtual events throughout the year.
Americans United’s Youth Organizing Fellowship (YOF) program entered its fifth year in 2024. The Fellowship is a paid opportunity for young activists to grow as leaders, build connections with other activists and learn how to advocate for issues like the separation of church and state, inclusive religious freedom, abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights and strong public schools. The YOF program joins other youth initiatives, including AU’s Student Contest, the Legal Academy and many internship and legal fellowship opportunities.
We also announced Sanchi Rohira as the 2024 David Norr Youth Activist Award winner at the Summit for Religious Freedom in April, alongside four honorable mentions. (We’re accepting nominations for the 2025 award now!) These young people will lead the fight for separation of church and state into the future.
Months before the election, Americans United began preparing for the possibility of a second term by Donald Trump. AU’s team formulated an action plan and will ready as soon as Trump takes office.
The day after the election, Laser stated, “We’ve been warning of the dangers of Project 2025 and white Christian Nationalism and we know that the majority of Americans are against their agenda. ‘We the People’ are with us. That is our path to victory. For nearly 80 years Americans United has defended church-state separation and repelled previous waves of white Christian Nationalism. We’ve been through a Trump administration before. It was a hard four years, but we fought back… We’re not giving up now.”
Americans United scored many important legal wins in 2024. Tomorrow you’ll read more about victories in several of our landmark cases fighting Christian Nationalism in public education.
AU and allies secured an important win for Mark Janny, an atheist from Colorado whose parole officer sent him back to jail after Janny refused to take part in Christian worship services and other religious activities at a Christian mission where he was required to reside while on parole. Under the terms of the legal settlement, Janny was awarded $100,000 in monetary damages.
Another win involved Elizabeth and Gabe Rutan-Ram, a Jewish couple in Tennessee who were denied services by a taxpayer-funded Christian adoption agency. A state court initially dismissed their lawsuit, but a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals of Tennessee reversed and ruled that the Rutan-Rams have standing – the right to sue – as prospective foster parents and as taxpayers. In May, the Tennessee Supreme Court refused to grant the state’s request to review the appellate court’s ruling.
We also represented Janay Garrick, a teacher at Moody Bible Institute, where she taught secular courses in communications. When Garrick raised issues of sex discrimination at the school, she was fired. Garrick sued and, after Moody tried to have the case dismissed, a federal appeals court accepted AU’s argument and is allowing the case to move forward.
In 2024, Americans United worked aggressively to defend reproductive freedom. Our case challenging Missouri’s restrictive ban on abortion as a violation of church-state separation came to successful conclusion after voters enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution through a ballot initiative that AU supported. Following that win, AU and the National Women’s Law Center declared victory and withdrew the lawsuit that had been filed on behalf 13 members of the clergy.
AU’s legal team filed important briefs in reproductive freedoms cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. We urged the high court to secure access to the abortion drug mifepristone, which did the court did in June, and to uphold a federal law that requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care to pregnant patients.
In addition, Americans United in June joined nine religious and civil-rights organizations in urging the Indiana Supreme Court to protect religious freedom by letting stand an injunction against an Indiana abortion ban that imposes legislators’ religious views on all state residents (just yesterday the state high court ruled to allow the preliminary injunction against the ban to remain in place while the case proceeds). AU also criticized a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that human embryos are children and are entitled to legal rights. The ruling, which was laced with religious rhetoric, threatened to end IVF treatments in the state.
AU also sponsored several screenings of the documentary “Under G-D,” a short film highlighting the work of Jewish activists to support abortion rights.
Check in tomorrow to read about the final five Top Ten issues of 2024!
