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The religious right is trying to take over Arizona. This race will decide whether they win. [1]
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Date: 2022-07-04
In the majority opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the national right to an abortion, Justice Samuel Alito promised that Americans still had the power to secure reproductive freedom by voting in state and local elections. It was a facetious rationalization, a twisting of the knife cloaked as constitutional interpretation, because Alito and his reactionary colleagues have also spent a full decade dismantling voting rights protections and demolishing our fractured democracy.
After a brutal round of gerrymandering, there are only a few GOP-controlled states where the vast pro-choice majority — and most states have a pro-choice majority — will have a legitimate chance of electing leaders willing to pass new abortion protections. Among this fall’s elections, an open gubernatorial race and ultra-tight legislative margins mean that Arizona represents the best opportunity to flip a state government, restore reproductive rights, and secure fair elections going forward.
After years of organizing, Democrats need to flip just two seats to win control of the state senate. Their best odds are in LD 2, where the party’s candidate, Jeanne Casteen, represents an almost algorithmically designed alternative to the state GOP’s current agenda.
Driven by a horde of “Stop the Steal” lunatics, Arizona Republicans have lurched to the far right, embracing the most paranoid and theocratic extremes of the reactionary fringe. They have launched a full-on assault on public education, given massive tax breaks to the wealthiest few, bumbled through the famously disastrous election “audit,” and revived a complete and total abortion ban that dates back to 1901. In short, it’s been a breathless two-year display of Christian fundamentalism and right-wing antipathy for public education and equity.
In Casteen, a long-time public school teacher and outspoken advocate for secular government, voters have an opportunity to not just cast a vote against the Arizona GOP’s extremism, but voice unequivocal support for a break from the soft commingling of church and state that normalized the path to this new theocracy.
Casteen is a familiar face for voters in this Phoenix-area district. A long-time middle school teacher, Casteen became involved in her local school board in 2012 and served a term as its president. In 2020, she fell just half a point short of winning election as Maricopa County school superintendent, a position that would have put her in charge of a vast majority of the state’s K-12 students.
x Last night I joined my fellow Arizonans in marching to protect abortion rights after today's disastrous ruling by the Supreme Court. Their decision will not end abortion; it will only end SAFE abortions. It is more important than ever that we flip the legislature this November. pic.twitter.com/lnEsyduWsp — Jeanne Casteen for Arizona Senate, LD2 (@JC4AZ) June 25, 2022
For the past two years, she’s worked as the executive director of Secular Coalition for Arizona, a non-profit that works to preserve the separation of church and state by promoting evidence-based policies that value facts over any particular faith. Between the rightward turn at the Arizona statehouse and recent decisions by the Supreme Court, it’s been quite busy at the office.
“Suddenly, we're getting more signups every day than we than we've ever really gotten,” Casteen says. “We're getting all kinds of inquiries that we've never gotten before. People are reaching out to me and saying, ‘Holy cow, look, the Supreme Court is a bunch of religious extremists. How could I have not known? What can I do to help?’”
CLICK HERE to Donate to Jeanne Casteen via ActBlue!
Casteen says that some of Secular AZ’s most enthusiastic supporters are devoutly religious, yet squeamish about the tenets of any particular gospel being imposed on people through state power. The organization teams up quite frequently with representatives from the Arizona Faith Network, a coalition of local religious leaders “dedicated to bringing people together to promote peace and understanding.”
She’s also found an ally in State Sen. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, a Presbyterian minister who supports abortion rights, the LGBTQ+ community, gun control, and the many other issue page policies that we’ve come to expect from Democrats. Stahl Hamilton has published op-eds cautioning Arizonans about the “perils of legislating religious doctrine” and arguing for the preservation of the crumbling wall between church and state.
While counterintuitive-seeming enough to be granted column inches in a mid-sized metro newspaper, Stahl Hamilton’s position is hardly unique. For years, progressive religious leaders have attempted to mount counter-offensives to neutralize the swelling power of the conservative televangelist and mega-church movement, countering the rigidity and intolerance of the Robertson-Falwell types with a more tolerant and inclusive interpretation of scripture.
For decades, Democratic candidates have tried to thread this needle, presenting their political beliefs as informed by their profound faith. When those candidates win, and their electoral successes lead to substantive gains for working people, it’s undoubtedly worth celebrating; lawmakers like Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia are rare and invaluable. But when broadly pursued, the faith-driven strategy is not without its risks, as emphasizing personal piousness as moral Northstar reinforces the notion that religious convictions should be heavily factored into government decisions.
Even without citing scripture or engaging in denominational debate on the Senate floor, implicitly positioning public policy as a choice between biblical interpretations serves to move the goal posts on the national tolerance of theological government. This serves to ease the way for absurd Supreme Court rulings (see the one just handed down in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District) and statewide policies, including Arizona’s massive new expansion of private school vouchersthat will send billions in state funding to religious institutions.
Not only do those new precedents and policies defy constitutional protections, they also defy the burgeoning national decline in religious affiliation.
The Arizona GOP’s Holy War on Education
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