Americans United has been working to sound the alarm over Project 2025, a radical scheme by Christian Nationalists and their allies to remake virtually every segment of American society in a theocratic image.
AU resources, including a new tookit designed to help people talk to others about the dangers of Project 2025. But if you know people who want a shorthand version, you should direct them to this story in The Guardian.
The piece does a great job of putting a human face on the threat posed by Project 2025. It profiles Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram, a Tennessee couple who wanted to foster to adopt a 3-year-old but were stymied after a state-funded Christian adoption agency refused to work with them because the couple is Jewish.
Americans United, which is representing the Rutan-Rams in court, has been highlighting their story because it’s a perfect example of the real harm real people will face if Project 2025 is enacted. As The Guardian notes, “Project 2025’s Adoption Reform section calls for the passage of legislation to ensure providers ‘cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.’ It also calls for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that prohibits discrimination against prospective parents and subsequent amendments made by the Biden administration.”
Project 2025 calls for allowing religious adoption/foster care agencies to rake in all the taxpayer money they can and still slam their doors in the faces of people like Liz and Gabe. Not only does rank discrimination like this offend American values, but it also harms the children who need the type of loving home the Rutan-Rams are willing and eager to offer.
The Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, an adjunct professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a member of AU’s Faith Advisory Council, put it succinctly: “The definition of family according to Project 2025 leaves a lot of folk out. This blueprint really delegitimizes the kinds of families that are day in and day out raising children, paying taxes, contributing meaningfully to society.”
This is the America the backers of Project 2025 are scheming to foist on all of us. To call it dystopian is an understatement.
If you doubt that, just talk to Liz and Gabe Rutan-Ram.
