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Article Excerpt
Civil Rights n pl : the nonpolitical rights of a citizen; esp: the rights of personal liberty guaranteed to U. S. citizens by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and by acts of Congress. (1)
In "Atheism Is Not a Civil Rights Issue" (FREE INQUIRY, February/March 2004), DJ Grothe and Austin Dacey wrote:
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 leader's in the nonreligious community and have never been presented with a single compelling example.
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.
In 1995, the United Nations Non-Governmental Organization Committee on Freedom of Religion or Belief invited me to submit information on discrimination against atheists by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). The committee's mission was to record and monitor incidents of intolerance around the world. I was told that my findings would be published in the committee's final report only if the cases I documented were grievous by its standards. The committee quickly recognized that Scouting's discrimination against atheists was no less severe than its far more widely reported discrimination against gays. A synopsis of my findings was included in the committee's published report. (2)
Shortly afterward, the same UN committee asked me to assess other incidents of discrimination--in particular, what...
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