Friend:

Last week, my husband and I, joined by our dog Teddy, drove across the country to New Mexico for a month of remote work. When I’m on the road like this, I like to talk to the people I meet about Americans United and the work that we do. This always leads to interesting conversations.

In Little Rock, a server told me she had stockpiled emergency contraception because abortion is already illegal in the state. No man, she said, was going to force her to give birth against her will. As we talked, a woman at a table nearby overheard us and chimed in, “Christians need to stop telling me what to do.” She added that she had grown up Southern Baptist. I asked her what people around there thought of church-state separation. She was blunt: “There is no separation of church and state here,” she said, visibly frustrated.

In Oklahoma City, I spoke to a frightened young woman who said that if she or her friends need an abortion, they’ll have to flee the state and hope no one finds out. She wanted an IUD but feared that they were already banned. (They’re not, but the fear and confusion are deliberate side effects of these harmful attacks.) When I told her about AU and our work, she simply replied, “Bless you.”

These past weeks have been devastating. I am continually asked by disheartened people what we can possibly do now. My answer is consistent: We must persevere, and we must work together. Across many causes, we are fighting the same religious extremist opposition. We need each other; indeed, we cannot succeed without each other.

Like you, I find myself looking for hope. I find it in the righteous anger of those women I talked to in Arkansas and Oklahoma. I see it in the words of legal writer Dahlia Lithwick, who asked, “What does it mean, the opposing imperative of honoring the feeling of being shattered, while gathering up whatever is left to work harder?” and in the writings of Rebecca Traister in The Cut: We “find the way to hope, not as feel-good anesthetic but as tactical necessity.” To do anything else is to give up.

I see hope when I look at the young, bright, and talented interns who have joined Americans United this summer. During staff meetings, we often ask them to tell us why they wanted to come to AU. In their answers, I hear the determination, the energy and the persistence that will carry us forward.

The future is in good hands. It’s a future that does not belong to religious extremists, Christian nationalists or even justices on our Supreme Court who want us to live in a benighted past. We will not go back. With your support, AU is leading the way forward. For that I thank you.

With hope and determination,

Rachel K. Laser
President and CEO