I am in receipt of an email today from Devon Graham at American Atheists, about Ron DeSantis’s frenzied efforts to force Florida women to stay pregnant against their wills.

In recent weeks, there have been a number of reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been abusing his administrative powers and spending unprecedented state resources in a religiously motivated bid to quash Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban and enshrine reproductive health care access in Florida’s state constitution. 

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, which DeSantis oversees, launched a website alleging the initiative “threatens women’s safety” and is paying for public service announcements urging Floridians to vote no on the measure.

(That’s ambiguous. I think it means the agency launched a website and also is paying for announcements, as opposed to the initiative threatens women’s safety and is paying for announcements.)

Those letters were signed by John Wilson, who at the time was working as the department’s general counsel but has since resigned and become something of a whistleblower. Wilson alleges it was DeSantis’ top advisors who developed the legal strategy, drafted the letters, and pressured him into signing them. He was also “directed” to “execute contracts for outside counsel” to assist in censoring their political opponents. It’s been reported those contracts will cost Florida taxpayers up to $1.4 million. 

Last week, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction against the DeSantis administration and didn’t mince words in his ruling: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.” 

Undeterred by constitutional constraints, DeSantis has continued to hold a series of campaign-like rallies with anti-abortion doctors across the state. At one of these events on Monday — the first day for early voting here in Florida — Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez told attendees, “We cannot go to church and pray like Christians and turn around and vote like atheists.” The Associated Press reported that because she and DeSantis are appearing at these “press conferences” in their official capacities, state resources are being used for planning and travel.

I can’t be entirely sure what Nuñez meant by her comment, other than to say the quiet part out loud: Banning abortion is about forcing a single, narrow religious stance on the rest of us. Did she intend to insult us atheists in a “you throw like a girl” kind of way, and/or is she implying that real Christians can’t be pro-choice? Respectively, I’m not offended, and that’s not true.

I think it has to do with valorizing belief in approved fictions. People “pray like Christians” because they believe the fictions of Xianity – the always absent but very real god, the always absent but very real child of the always absent god, the importance and beauty and utility of chatting with and to and at the absent god and the absent god’s absent child, and the overriding importance of the process inside a woman’s body that will after 9 months result in a baby.