FFRF Action Fund, the lobbying arm of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is giving a shoutout this week to Oklahoma state Rep. Mickey Dollens for championing funding of public schools, while denouncing ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s theocratic actions.
Dollens, named FFRF Action Fund’s “Secularist of the Week,” recently pointed out in a tweet that legislation to fund private school tax credits means “700,000 public school students and 40,000 teachers are left out in the cold.” Dollens urged. “It’s time to stop this madness and give our public schools top priority.” Putting Dollens’ remarks in context is FFRF Action Fund’s roundup on 2023 voucher legislation this week warning that “more taxpayer funds than ever are headed to private religious schools.”
FFRF Action Fund’s “Theocrat of the Week,” Michael Flynn, is co-founder of the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist series of rallies. One was held just the previous weekend at the Trump National Doral Miami resort. At a Flynn rally last fall, the retired three-star Army general and former (short-lived) White House national security adviser had invited people to be baptized in three large metal tubs outside the speakers’ tents. He urged onlookers to get involved in “spiritual war.”
As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg describes Flynn:
Flynn has long been a paranoid Islamophobe, and toward the end of Trump’s presidency, he emerged as a full-fledged authoritarian, calling on Trump to invoke martial law after the 2020 election. Now he’s become, in addition to an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and QAnon adherent, one of the country’s most prominent Christian nationalists. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” he said at a 2021 ReAwaken America event. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right?”
The Miami event was scheduled to include antisemites Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, who were to share the stage with Eric Trump, until MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow exposed remarks by them praising Hitler.
“The Reawaken America Tour and Flynn’s intemperate words and actions ought to wake up Americans to the growing dangers of Christian nationalism,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF Action Fund president.
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.
