A leading community newspaper in Delaware has published a Freedom From Religion Foundation op-ed on religion’s centrality in the anti-abortion perspective.

FFRF Senior Policy Counsel Ryan Jayne opens his piece in the Cape Gazette (which covers the Cape region of Delaware) by detailing the benefits of Senate Bill 5, a bill that aims to protect the access of state residents to reproductive health care. 

“It would enshrine reproductive freedom in the Delaware Constitution, as many progressive states have done, and ensure that decisions about pregnancy remain where they belong: between patients and their doctors,” he writes. “In a post-Roe landscape where abortion rights have become fragile and uneven, state lawmakers need to provide new, more permanent protections for the right to bodily autonomy.”

Unfortunately, not everyone in Delaware is willing to support this common-sense measure due to faith trumping reason:

At a recent hearing on SB 5, an opponent warned lawmakers that any right to abortion must yield to “the law of Christ, which our constitution stands pale next to.” Another cited Scripture as governing authority, invoking Psalm 139 and Romans 13 to argue that the government should enforce their interpretation of divine will. And one opponent accused supporters of wanting to “enshrine abortion on the altar of worship and sacrifice to the devil,” even adding for good measure, “May God have mercy on your souls.”

This is not policymaking; this is sermonizing.

It is worth pausing on the specific texts being invoked. Romans 13 has a long and troubling history in American political life. Defenders of slavery used it to demand obedience to unjust laws. It was later invoked to justify segregation, was invoked in President Donald J. Trump’s first term to justify family separation, and was even cited earlier this year by House Speaker Mike Johnson to defend border policies against papal criticism. Appeals to that passage have consistently been used not to advance freedom, but to resist it.

Psalm 139, likewise, is not the benign, feel-good verse it is often presented as in political settings. The same psalm that speaks of being “fearfully and wonderfully made” also calls on believers to hold a “perfect hatred” for those who oppose God. It is telling that so many opponents turn to Psalm 139 to justify their “life begins at conception” dogma, since the Bible does not actually address abortion at all.

The good news is that lawmakers do not need to resolve these scriptural disputes, because they should never legislate based on their personal religious beliefs in the first place. To uphold their oath of office, lawmakers must respect the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom for everyone. That means if they can’t give a secular justification for something, they should not be legislating it.

The piece ends by emphasizing how government should aim to serve all people instead of bowing down to the religious beliefs of one specific group: “As this important constitutional amendment moves forward, it offers more than just protections for reproductive freedom. It offers a model for how legislators should approach difficult issues, not by quoting Scripture or appealing to divine authority, but by relying on evidence, respecting individual rights and recognizing that in a diverse society, the law belongs to all of us.”

You can read the full op-ed here.

This column is part of FFRF’s initiative to engage with pertinent national and state issues and spread the messages of freethought and nontheism to a broader audience.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 41,000 members across the country, including more than 100 members in Delaware. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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