At anti-abortion rally, Florida Lt. Gov. urges everyone to not "vote like atheists"
"We cannot go to church and pray like Christians and turn around and vote like atheists," Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez said
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When Florida began early voting last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez spoke at an event alongside a slew of anti-abortion doctors (all wearing white coats to project trust and authority) to tell the state to reject Amendment 4. That ballot measure, if it passes with 60% support, would undo the state’s extreme (six-week) abortion ban. It’s currently polling at exactly 60% support, which means the final result could go either way.
That event, which was promoted by the governor’s office and used state resources, was effectively a religious rally. It even closed with a prayer by Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski. But setting that aside for now, I wanted to focus on a different problem.
The line that grabbed the most attention came when Nuñez urged the like-minded audience members—and the people who would see clips of her speech later—to follow their religious values in order to help the DeSantis administration punish women.
… We are right next door to St. Teresa, one of the most iconic churches in Miami-Dade County, and just yesterday, thousands of people walked through that door and through the doors of churches all around our state to pray, to worship, to hear the word of God.
And while I know that one of our doctors said this isn't a religious amendment, here's what I will say: We cannot go to church and pray like Christians and turn around and vote like atheists.
The applause went on for a while after that line.
It’s not hard to interpret what she was saying: Religious people who supported abortion rights were turning their backs on God. It was wrong to oppose abortion extremism. You were an atheist if you voted otherwise. And you don’t want to be an atheist, do you?!
The line wasn’t surprising in the least coming from a Republican, and yet it deserves a closer examination because of how thoughtless it really was.
When Nuñez condemns voting like atheists, what she’s telling everyone is that it’s wrong to listen to the horror stories from women who have been unable to get the health care they need in states where post-Dobbs laws have endangered their lives or, in several cases, have killed them. It’s wrong to consider how Florida’s laws ban the procedure before some women even know they’re pregnant. It’s wrong to allow a woman and her doctor to decide what should happen to her body and that Florida Republicans are inherently better suited to make that decision for her.
The line also, as Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s Rob Boston notes, unfairly “demonizes people who don’t believe in God by implying that there’s something wrong with the way they vote.”
Nuñez is also trying to make religious people feel guilty for choosing choice, even though surveys have repeatedly shown that Christians are far from monolithic on this subject. A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that while 97% of religiously unaffiliated Americans opposed abortion bans with no exceptions, that number was 89% among Catholics and 77% among white evangelicals. (Florida’s current law makes it all but impossible to obtain an abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The state says survivors must have documentation of the assault to be able to get the procedure—and, even in those situations, it’s illegal after 15 weeks.)
How many Americans said abortion should be legal in all cases or mostly legal? 85% of “Nones,” 56% of Catholics, and 24% of white evangelicals. In other words, there are lots of religious people, including religious conservatives, who support abortion rights, at least in some situations, contrary to what Florida’s Republican leaders want.
(Voting like atheists, by the way, doesn’t automatically mean supporting abortion rights in every situation either. But that nuance is lost on Nuñez.)
If Florida’s Amendment 4 passes, it’ll be because Floridians of all religious backgrounds, including those without any religious faith, oppose the kind of anti-abortion extremism that the state’s leaders have forced upon them.
In a letter to Nuñez, the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Annie Laurie Gaylor & Dan Barker condemned her remarks while bringing up the kind of statistics I just mentioned:
Your remarks not only show an unseemly hostility to millions of good, taxpaying Americans who are atheists, but reveal you are not up-to-date with current surveys on approval of abortion rights by Americans of diverse faiths…
…
While your remarks were intended to denigrate atheists and promote your own Christian beliefs, in fact we would suggest that our country would be a whole lot better off if more people “voted like an atheist.” Voting like an atheist means supporting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, understanding the science of climate change, championing individual rights and personal freedoms — including the right to legal abortion care, and preserving our democracy against Christian nationalists who want to impose their religion on everyone else.
…
Please start honoring the secular Constitution you took an oath to uphold.
Voting like an atheist, in short, means thinking about the impact your decision will have on the people and the world around you, trying to create a more just world for everyone regardless of their personal beliefs, and respecting expertise where it’s warranted.
The fact that Nuñez could trash an entire “religious” subgroup like this is an example of Christian privilege. If Tim Walz urged people to stop voting like white evangelicals, we’d never hear the end of it—for good reason—but when politicians, especially Republican ones, go after atheists, Muslims, or other groups that don’t usually support them, there’s almost no pushback.
AU’s Boston put it simply: “Tarring an entire class of people for what they believe or don’t believe about God is crude and offensive.”
Republicans pander to the preachers while viewing human decency as a character flaw. They constantly demonstrate the disconnect between religion and morality. Slapping the word Christian on something does not render it moral. Voting from religious conviction puts every single freedom you have in jeopardy, because authoritarian government and conservative religion are natural allies. It is a symbiotic relationship that does not believe in personal freedom and has dealt humanity nothing but misery.
I voted like an atheist and rejected the theocratic wannabe ticket. I also voted like an actual believer and rejected the guy who cannot claim adherence to any one of the 10 commandments.