May 30, 2004

Discrimination against the non-religious

Margaret Downey takes exception to DJ Grothe and Austin Dacey who argue that atheism is not a civil rights issue. Grothe and Dacey write:
To our knowledge, there is no such thing as “atheist bashing.” If there were cases of such harm, one would expect to hear about them in the media and the courts, or at least in the common knowledge of unbelievers. So, where are the cases? On many occasions we have put this question to leaders in the nonreligious community and have never been presented with a single compelling example.
Not so fast, argues Downey, who provides evidence to the contrary and writes:
I greatly respect Grothe and Dacey, but in light of my own research I believe that they provided a misleading perception of the nonreligious community and its predicament. For almost a decade, I have been documenting acts of discrimination against the nonreligious through the Anti-Discrimination Support Network (ADSN), a committee of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you look at the history of atheism in the 20th century and beyond, you can easily argue that it has been the atheist community that has had a greater tendency to be tyrannical and discriminatory.