And it's endorsing political candidates.
Yesterday, I was driving home to Chicago from St. Louis, where Mrs. Left and I had spent the weekend scouting for a
100+ yo home to rehabilitate in a historical preservation district. That is when I drove past the billboard attacking Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) because of his alleged support from the "atheist lobby".
After almost 50 years together, Mrs. Left and I don't chatter a lot when we take a long drive; there really isn't that much left unsaid, anymore. But I was moved to remark, "Look over there, Hon. Someone says there is an "atheist lobby". We have a lobby? Who knew?"
I thought that if atheists have a lobby, it isn't really doing a very good job, looking at the country as a whole. On the ground, its hard to see much that looks like progress for atheism.
The kernal of truth hidden within this highway eyesore is that there is an organization, the Secular Coalition of America (SCA), which happens to favor a secular America, a nation without religious tests for office and government establishment or endorsement of any religion, as the country's founders wrote explicitly in the U.S. Constitution, and SCA does issue election year candidate assessments, this year giving Senator Durbin their highest marks for his votes on legislation of interest to the organization. But the idea that there is something in America influential enough to be called the "atheist lobby" seemed ridiculous to me. This country appears to be mostly hag-ridden by superstitious zealots religiously inspired to impose their views on the whole country, no matter whose personal freedoms get trampled along the way.
Then I saw a piece in an online post at Psychology Today that started me to rethink whether atheists are making progress in America, towards protecting the civil rights of non-believers. In the post, the author, David Niose, of the American Humanist Association, in Washington D.C. (the Humanist Lobby?), responds to the billboard and also to recent blatantly anti-atheist remarks by Justice Anton Scalia, saying:
Indeed, the very fact that there is an “Atheist Lobby” demonstrates the remarkable advancement of the secular demographic in the last decade. The “A Rating” to which the billboard refers comes from the Secular Coalition for America, a coalition of over a dozen atheist and humanist groups from around the country that have joined forces to urge legislators to protect church-state separation and the rights of nonbelievers. A generation ago such a lobby would have been unthinkable, but today it’s a sign of this rising demographic.
The second high-profile anti-atheist swipe came from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who told a crowd at Colorado Christian University that nonbelievers are just plain wrong when they expect equality from their government: “I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.”
* * * * *
Scalia is a smart guy, and he can see the writing on the wall. Back when almost all atheists were in hiding and therefore unable to assert their rights as valid citizens – which has been the case for most of Scalia’s life – they could be ignored as government officials pandered to religious interest groups that were largely unopposed in their expectations of favoritism. But now that seculars are actually standing up and demanding to be taken seriously (even promoting visible secularity through efforts such as Openly Secular), it becomes necessary for Scalia and his religious right companions to make the bold claim: religious Americans deserve special treatment as a matter of law, and government should play favorites.
These remarks suggests that atheists have sufficiently begun to come out of the closet so that we are at or near a social tipping point, similar, perhaps, to what is now going on in reference to marriage equality and reform of marijuana laws.
Glory hallelujah, our day of Jubilee is finally coming at last. Maybe, at last, it will finally be the atheists turn to be set free.