On Tuesday, the growing secular population reached a milestone. Jamie Raskin, a state senator from Maryland, won the Democratic Party primary to succeed Rep. Chris Van Hollen in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. Van Hollen won his own primary to become the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate and replace the retiring incumbent Barbara Mikulski. Raskin is an open humanist who was endorsed by the American Humanist Association’s Freethought Equality Fund. The district is a safe Democratic seat, making it almost a certainty that he will become the first openly atheist candidate to win Congressional seat.
Coincidentally, Maryland’s 8th Congressional District is where I have resided for the last 4 years and my part of the district belongs to Raskin’s state senate district. Given this history it was natural for me to vote for him. However he wasn’t the only qualified candidate in the race, which was crowded, and my decision to support him wasn’t an instantaneous one.
People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
What made a major difference in my decision to vote for Sen. Raskin was the endorsement and excellent outreach of the Freethought Equality Fund. In a race that broke spending records and where three candidates had a decent chance of winning, every vote counted.
In a weird turn of events the district that apparently was bombarded by mail ads, but I never received ads from any candidate despite being fairly reliable Democratic voter in Connecticut and Maryland. It wasn’t until the Freethought Equality Fund reached out to me with letters and ads on behalf of Raskin that I was officially mobilized.
Of course, I didn’t vote for Raskin just because he’s a fellow atheist. He’s also a progressive who stands for many of the same things that I do because of my humanism. In this sense, the AHA and the Freethought Equality Fund found an excellent high-profile candidate to endorse. He shares humanist values and identifies as one, but he’s also an experienced lawmaker (and the only leading candidate in that race with experience in elective office).
Raskin’s victory in the primary shows how that applying the muscle of the secular movement as a collective entity can lead to political victories. More importantly, he’s not some candidate trying to get money out of us but a fellow member of our movement. Our movement just demonstrated it can play in the big leagues, that it can deliver, and that one of us can win a high-profile campaign (our “hometown” media market is Washington, DC) without having to hide his identity. Kudos to the AHA for a job well done in building our movement’s political capital.
The LatiNone 