May 19, 2025 – “I tell law students if you’re not used to fighting losing battles, don’t become a lawyer. Our job is to stand up for people who can’t do it themselves. Our job is to be the champion of lost causes. But right now we can’t lose the battles we are facing. We need trained and passionate and committed lawyers to fight this fight. With all the uncertainty that exists at this moment, this is our time to stand up and be heard. For me, being here with you is an act of solidarity.” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, May 2025
These are not the words of someone coasting through history from a seat on the highest court in the land. They are the words of a woman burdened by the direction of our nation and deeply moved by the fragility of our constitutional promises. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent remarks at an American Bar Association’s symposium were more than a speech. They were a plea — to lawyers, public servants and citizens — not to give up.
I had the immense honor of briefly meeting Justice Sotomayor in 2016, when she spoke at the University of Wisconsin. As she walked through the crowd, she touched my hand. At the time, I didn’t know she would go on to become my favorite justice (sorry, Ruth), but something about her warmth and presence stayed with me.
As an attorney working to defend the wall between state and church, I confess that I too often feel the weight of that same sadness and frustration. It can be overwhelming to watch federal judges reinterpret longstanding precedent, state legislatures push religious indoctrination into public schools, and members of Congress propose tax-sheltering schemes to fund private religious education — all while claiming to represent “freedom.”
Justice Sotomayor didn’t name specific decisions, but she didn’t have to. Anyone who has read her blistering dissents in cases like Carson v. Makin or Kennedy v. Bremerton School District knows how deeply she values the principle of religious liberty for all — not religious privilege for some. “Our job is to stand up for people who can’t do it themselves. And our job is to be the champion of lost causes,” she emphasized. That truth is central to our mission at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, where we work daily to ensure that the nonreligious, religious minorities and students in public schools are protected from government-sponsored religion.
But perhaps her most important message was: “With all the uncertainty that exists at this moment, this is our time to stand up and be heard.” And stand up — even when we know we might lose.
That sentiment reminds me of another of my legal heroes, though fictional: Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In the deeply segregated South, Finch defends Tom Robinson, an innocent Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. He knows the jury will likely convict Robinson regardless of the evidence, and yet he pours everything into the case. As he tells his children: “I wanted you to see what real courage is … It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” He loses the case — but not his integrity, and not the importance of standing for what is right even when success seems impossible.
Courage in our work doesn’t always look like winning in court (though we often do). Sometimes it looks like filing a complaint in a hostile state where the odds are stacked against us. Sometimes it looks like representing a student willing to speak out against prayer at graduation, knowing their community will turn on them. Sometimes it means asking the current administration why it is promoting Christian nationalism, when we know the answer will be evasive at best.
The fight for true religious liberty — the right to live without being forced to pray, believe or fund someone else’s religion — is long. Justice Sotomayor has reminded us that it’s worth fighting, not because victory is assured, but because the Constitution demands it and the vulnerable need us.
So we stand up. We stand up for students in Oklahoma, where public schools are being used to indoctrinate students into religion, despite Superintendent Ryan Walters’ suing us to try to make us stand down. We stand up for public school students across the country who are forced to sit through proselytizing assemblies disguised as motivational talks. We stand up for parents who want their children to learn science, not scripture, in class. We stand up for city residents fighting government-sponsored prayer at meetings where local policy is decided. We stand up for the 29 percent of Americans who are nonreligious — and for religious minorities, too — because everyone deserves equal treatment under the law. We stand up, as Justice Sotomayor has urged us to, because when you’re fighting for what is right, you have no choice but to see it through.
Let’s keep standing up.
Chris Line received his B.S. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2012. He began working for FFRF in 2015 as a legal intern while attending law school at the University of Wisconsin. Shortly after receiving his Juris Doctor in 2017, Chris began working full-time for FFRF as a Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow. He became an FFRF staff attorney in September 2019. He is an accomplished photographer whose work has appeared in The Humanist magazine, The Progressive, and FFRF’s own Freethought Today. His work can even be found on display in Freethought Hall. www.ffrf.org