Reply #4: I'm a wuss that way. There's one thing I wonder in all this greater bigotry thing though... [View All]

[dmallind]

Gays and atheists are about the same proportion of the population.

Both experience varying degrees of intolerance and discrimination up to and including being killed.

But the public awareness and level of interest and caring about this is vastly different.

Ask 100 random people on the street who Matthew Shepard is and I'm guessing somewhere between 25-50% would be able to say roughly what happened to him and why.

Ask 100 random people on the street who Larry Hooper is and you would get one or two people who knew the murdered atheist and one or two who mentioned a musician (same name, equal obscurity, different guy) with 95% blank looks.

Now I have nothing against gay folks (and as a bi guy myself have had nothing between me and gay folks quite a few timnes ;) ) but I am in envious awe of their PR ability and cohesiveness as an activist group. When I was in organized atheist groups one of the big weaknesses to me was how we used our activism. One group I was a long term memver of probably marched and demonstrated as much for gay rights as for atheistic causes, from May Day parades to the annual gay rights march to opposinbg Boy Scouts exclusion of gays with pickets at meetings etc. Obviously I agree with these causes, and agree that there is for most homophobes some religious component to their bigotry, but I wondered two things many times:

1) Why is a group created and run to do what little we could to resist religious hegemnoy and spread positive messages of atheism doing dedicating so much time to a perfectly valid and worthwhile cause that is however not directly related to it?

2) Why was it that this was only and always a one way street. The local HRC folks and parade organizers were pleased to get our support and numbers, but not once did any gay rights group show up to any purely atheistic event.

The answer to me seems to be a perfectly laudable and very very effective single minded focus to gay rights groups that atheist groups lack. We also spent a lot of time working on proe-choice causes etc. Many atheist groups I know work against the death penalty etc too. They say this is because most of their members agree (quite true - atheists are overwhelmingly if not entirely left of center) and because there is a religious component to the opposite arguments (often somewhat true, but stretched way too thin in many cases). However the same could be said of gay rights groups. A poll of THEIR members would doubtless show overwhelming support for reproductive choice and an end to the DP, but collectively as organized entities they are almost never drawn into supporting them. All their group efforts go towards their main cause.

I wonder what atheists could achieve if we were equally focused and dedicated instead of so scattershot and internally wranglesome.