No, not the frame on Roger Federer's tennis racket. I'm talking about this ridiculous commentary at the Worldnutdaily by William Federer, a man who rivals David Barton for mendacity and irrationality. Federer is a Christian Nation advocate who peddles the worst kind of tripe to his ignorant followers and here he's framing every single church/state controversy as one of Christians vs atheists.

Daily there are news reports of atheists offended by prayers at graduations and football games; offended by a Cross or Star of David; offended by Christmas carols or patriotic hymns; offended by Christmas trees and menorahs; offended by the Ten Commandments or "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance; offended a teacher might hint there may be a Creator; offended a soldier said "God bless you" at a funeral; offended the Boy Scout Oath says "Do my duty to God and my country"; or offended by a cross on a Veterans Memorial.

Nowhere in this essay does Federer even attempt to engage any of the arguments made on any of those issues by those he opposes. There isn't a single substantive argument in it. His entire goal is to convince readers that the only people who could possibly oppose teacher-led prayer in schools or Ten Commandments monuments or any of the other things he favors are atheists. And further, that atheists are a tiny minority so they don't matter. He continues:

But exactly how many atheists are in America, anyway?

USA Today published Feb. 25, 2008, the results of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

This survey "of the people" reported that 80.2 percent of Americans hold Judeo-Christian beliefs (51.3 percent Evangelical/Mainline Protestant Christian; 23.9 percent Catholic; 1.6 percent Orthodox & other Christian; 1.7 percent Mormon; and 1.7 percent Jewish.)

Those not reporting or who said nothing in particular represented 12.9 percent, while 1.2 percent were Unitarian-Universalist-Spiritual-New Age-Native; 0.7 percent Buddhist; 0.6 percent Muslim; 0.4 percent Hindu; 0.3 percent Other World Religions, 2.4 percent agnostic ... and only 1.6 percent atheist.

Imagine that - only 1.6 percent atheists, yet their beliefs are becoming the law of the land.

Talk about skewing the figures. He lumps everyone on one side of the fence - even agnostics and those with no religion - and puts atheists on the others. And he uses the idiotic "Judeo-Christian" phrasing as well. But guess who the plaintiff is in the case to remove the giant Mt. Soledad cross from government property in San Diego? Jewish Veterans of America. Indeed, most American Jewish organizations take a strong stand in favor of strict separation of church and state. Clearly this is a dishonest way of framing the argument.

Let's look at some of the plaintiffs in other major court cases. He mentioned football game prayers, so let's look at Doe v Santa Fe, the last Supreme Court decision on that issue in 2000. Guess what? No atheists involved. The plaintiffs were Mormon and Catholic parents, students and alumni of the school. Oops.

How about Ten Commandments cases? The last major cases came from Texas and Kentucky. In the Kentucky case, McCreary, the plaintiffs were Louanne Walker, a Christian, and Dave Howe, a preacher's kid who was nearly 70 when the suit was filed. Ironically, the defendant in the suit was Walker's cousin, Jimmie Greene, who had put the displays up. But nope, not an atheist in sight.

How about evolution/creationism cases? Good luck finding an atheist plaintiff in any of them. All of the plaintiffs in McLean and Edwards were Christian pastors and bishops. Nearly all of the plaintiffs in the Dover case were Christians, many of them active Sunday School teachers. In many of the earlier cases involving the pledge of allegiance, the plaintiffs were Jehovah's Witnesses.

All of this shows just how utterly dishonest Federer's framing is on this issue. There's only one reason why he does it: because he knows that most of his readers think atheists are evil. Thus if he ties opposition on those issues to atheists, most of them will take the cognitive shortcut directly to the conclusion he wants them to make. But all of this is also completely devoid of substance.

Even if every single lawsuit on these issues was filed by an atheist, Federer has done nothing to engage their arguments. He is engaged in the argumentum ad labelum, believing that the mere act of applying the label "atheist" to them defeats their argument. But only someone terminally incapable of rational thinking would believe that. He hasn't even engaged their arguments, much less defeated them. This is precisely the sort of shoddy, lazy, ignorant "thinking" we've come to expect from these folks.