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Atheism is indeed a civil rights issue: struggling for equality before the law.

Article Excerpt
In "Atheism Is Not a Civil Rights Issue," DJ Grothe and Austin Dacey deny that atheism is a civil rights issue. They reject the idea that nonbelievers should focus on electing other nonbelievers to political office. I disagree on both counts.

Is ATHEISM A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE?

One test of whether a minority group's struggle for equality is a civil rights issue is whether majority attitudes toward that minority reflect unreasonable prejudice or a desire to deny full legal rights to its members. By this standard, atheists' efforts to achieve legal and social equality indeed constitute a civil rights movement. Consider that, in 1958, a Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of American citizens would vote against a Black candidate for president on grounds of race alone. In a 1999 Gallup poll, that figure had declined to 4 percent. (1) That same 1999 Gallup poll revealed that a larger percentage of American citizens, 49 percent, would vote against an atheist on grounds of atheism alone than would vote against someone for any other reason. (2) Even though this is the lowest comparative percentage of people who said they would vote against someone just for being a nonbeliever, in absolute numbers, it is still a higher percentage than is applicable to any other historically disfavored group.

Given current attitudes, new laws that overtly discriminate against atheists would pass easily, and any such existing laws would eagerly be enforced--save only for the United States Supreme Court, which has held consistently since 1947 that no branch of government...

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