Once again, the unholy wars have broken out here at Scienceblogs. The latest skirmish got started when Matt Nisbet put up an article titled "ATHEISM IS NOT A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE." In this article, Nisbet claims that atheists don't face a civil rights struggle, but merely "a public image problem." Many of the comments left over there have argued with that basic point, as have PZ, Jason Rosenhouse, Mark Hoofnagle, and other Sciencebloggers. Personally, I think Nisbet is right on this one - but only if the term "civil rights" is defined so narrowly that it loses most of its meaning.
There is certainly no doubt that atheists in America have a public image problem. Actually, given the polls that have come out suggesting that less than half of Americans would vote for an otherwise well-qualified atheist who belonged to their own party, I'm not sure that "public image problem" really does the situation justice. At a minimum, it's an understatement that's in the same league as calling pedophilia a minor social deviation.
If we define "civil rights" as the rights that a group is promised under the law, then atheists do not have a civil rights problem in the United States. Under the Constitution, there can be no establishment of religion, and this has generally been interpreted by the courts (at least in recent decades) to mean that the government is also prohibited from favoring religion over a lack of religion. Unbelievers are promised the same treatment as believers, so there is no civil rights problem.
Of course, under that logic, the civil rights movement should pretty much have been over once the voting rights act was passed and the segregation laws were ruled unconstitutional. Feminism should have wrapped things up once women got the right to vote. That didn't happen, of course, in either case, because most of us are capable of recognizing a simple, unpleasant fact: your rights on paper aren't necessarily the same as your actual rights.
Atheists, unfortunately, do face a great deal of discrimination. Actually, I should rephrase that. The discrimination is not faced by all atheists. It's faced by those people who, for whatever reason, choose to publicly identify themselves as nonbelievers. For one set of examples, you need look no further than child custody cases. Volokh has a laundry list of appeals court cases dealing with child custody. In all of these cases, judges - people sworn to uphold the Constitution - decided that a religious upbringing is "in a child's best interest," and used that as a factor in restricting custody rights of non-religious parents. There are plenty of other examples, many cited in the posts I linked to in the first paragraph.
I'm not trying to evoke (or, for that mater, spark) anything comparable with Selma, Alabama, but I think that when you have judges berating you for the damage that your lack of belief does to your children, you're talking about more than just a public image problem. The legal protections are there, so atheists don't face wholesale, legalized discrimination. That's good, but there are still a hell of a lot of retailers out there.
One of the issues, of course, is that atheists can easily become invisible, and catch a lot of abuse for not doing just that. Paul sums this up well:
Atheists benefit from the fact that our difference is entirely in our brains, so as long as we silence ourselves, we can 'pass'--it means that any civil rights problems we experience are going to be sporadic rather than unavoidable and pervasive. This is to our advantage, but it also has the unfortunate side effect that many who claim to be our friends think the best way for atheists to get what they want is to continue to be silent, and also lets them blame the atheists themselves for any problems, because they never would have occurred if only Dawkins would shut up and if those darned atheists would just stop expressing themselves.
In many ways, I think the choices involved are the most frustrating part of the whole thing. If, for example, I am called to testify in a court case, I have a choice. I can swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, "so help me God," or I can affirm that I will do so without invoking God. Both options are legally open to me, and I personally think that the affirmation is the more meaningful of the two. Ironically, though, if I am honest enough to affirm rather than swear to a God I don't know if I believe in, my credibility is likely to take a hit with many jurors.
If I'm honest, many will find me less believable. That's a bit more than just a public image problem.
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Good post, Mr. Dunford.
I'm not sure this is confined to the USA, but there seems to be a feverish, heady culture of evangelism there that drives prejudiced behaviour towards unbelievers.
Mme Metro blogged about a woman who "outed herself" to her workmates as an atheist, and blogged her experiences. You can't tell me there's no civil rights issue there.
Link:
http://atheistexposed.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html
We can illustrate the major difference very simply: If atheists went around on Saturday mornings bringing their good news to random households, they'd be in court faster than you can say "restraining order".
Nicely framed by Nisbet. I can see why he appreciates the power of framing!
Well said. I think you summed the issue up pretty well.
Indeed, until 1961, with the Torcaso decision by the Supreme Court, atheists were systematically denied actual civil rights by about a dozen states. They could not vote, hold office, or testify in court. Nisbet and his sources need to do some basic legal research.
I think you put this well. Atheism isn't just an "image problem", which is why I always put that phrase in quotes in my responses to Mr. Nisbet. However, it also doesn't require a full scale civil rights movement in the sense of getting rid of laws that discriminate against you or seeking laws to protect your rights.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy. You fall, I think, somewhere in between in that you need organizations to defend your legally acknowledged rights and to eliminate those last vestiges of "tradition" that are an affront to you as well as to many religious minorities. (Pre-1961, as Mr. Koepsell pointed out, a full-scale civil rights movement would have been necessary.) I think you also need to bring public visibility to the diversity and ordinariness of the atheist community. Silence harms you. Anyone who tells you that you should just shut up about being an atheist is an ignorant fool.
Let me address your examples, if I may. The custody issue you discuss doesn't just affect atheists. If you read Mr. Volokh's paper, "Parent-Child Speech and Child Custody Speech Restrictions," you'll see that these religious-based decisions also affect those of "non-mainstream" religions or a parent who is simply less religious than the other. This is, therefore, not an issue of atheists' rights exclusively, but of the rights of all religious minorities and a violation of separation of church and state.
As for the oath. As a practicing Jew, I also cannot take the oath as usually given, on a Christian Bible and thus, by extension, in the name of the Christian deity. Atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans, and even Christians who aren't permitted to swear such oaths are all in the same position. The tradition should be eliminated because it is a violation of separation of church and state and the establishment clause.
As for why the Civil Rights movement didn't end when the courts struck down segregation and the Voting Rights Act was passed. First, getting rid of laws that actively discriminate was not enough. They also had to seek laws that would protect them from discrimination and guarantee them equal access to housing, education, employment, health care, etc. They had to seek ways (like affirmative action) to bring African-Americans equal with others, since nearly a century of segregation after two and a half centuries of slavery had left them so far behind others in their access to the basic necessities of life. These things achieved, one would hardly state that the civil rights movement is still active. We're in the post-movement stage of vigilantly ensuring the application of the law.
Yes, it was legal to discriminate against atheists until 1961, but they were not consistently denied education, health care, housing, etc. on a massive scale. Atheists are not now in a condition of almost universal poverty because of those laws. You are now free of laws that target you for discrimination and you are protected by laws that make discrimination based on religion illegal. You're in a "post-movement" era of sorts.
This doesn't mean sit down and shut up. It simply means that you're in a position to force the application of existing laws and in cases like the child custody issue and the oath, you're in a position to join with all who care about the separation of church and state, whatever their religion or lack therefor. You do not need to go it alone in an atheist-specific movement.
It's a shame that reason is a minority movement, while adherence to faith in a supernatural-based folklore where no evidence exists is not just a majority tradition, but a massive shared hypnosis so profound that no one questions it.
Church-state separation laws are eroding as we speak. The Supreme Court recently ruled that religious organizations distributing faith-based (tax-payer funded) services could use religious discrimination in hiring and firing workers.
And anti-science "colleges" are rising up to create more extremist ideologues to infiltrate government organizations and advocate more widely spreading their brainwash. Everyone should be concerned--not just atheists.
David Koepsell:
Yes, it was legally allowable to violate the civil rights against atheists until way back in 1961, and that was obviously wrong, and I don't see Grothe/Dacey denying that. What they are saying in their articles is that atheists were not in a wholesale way denied their basic civil rights like blacks, women or gays have been, and they shouldn't pretend otherwise as an organizing strategy. Who in the world can disagree with this?
They go on to propose different ways of advancing the atheist position in society than by waging an all-out civil rights struggle, which I happen to agree with, and even Dawkins seems to agree with at places in his book! The past few days at SciBlogs is just a bunch of debating about things the writers never actually said. As I have said elsewhere, it appears that few people have actually read their original articles in Free Inquirer.
The truth is that there are atheist leaders and activists who actually believe that atheists need Marches on Washington, and that they need a massive civil rights movement all their own, just like women, blacks or gays. But it should be obvious that atheists do not suffer massive poverty and lack of opportunity because of violations to their civil rights, like it could be said blacks do. Atheists are not routinely bashed, like gays are, nor are they kept from family visitations at end of life scenarios. Atheists do not make a fraction of what believers make in the workforce, like women do compared to men. Atheists simply do not face laws that focus on their discrimination on par with blacks, women or gays and they are actually protected by the exact laws that make discrimination based on religion belief illegal.
Now this is not to say their rights dont need defending, especially with the current makeup of the Court. It is only to say that they dont need a movement focused on securing their civil rights (which is what people like Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, says they need. See the comments over at Pharyngula.)
Everyone is trying to make this EITHER a civil rights struggle, OR a P.R. campaign, but I don't see the original writers making it such a false choice.
You make a false argument; Groups do not have rights. Individuals have rights.
And individuals sometimes have their rights denied because of the group they belong to. Don't they, M J C?
Congratulations, MJC. That argument is trivial and trite, without being meaningful at all.
You know, rationaldeist, we may not need a March on Washington to protect our rights. What we do need is for atheists in public positions to make their religious positions known. We need for individuals to stand up and say "I am an atheist and I have rights." What we don't need is for people to say that since we don't have it so bad we should just reflect on our good fortune not to live in Virginia in the 1600's where we could be striped for not being in church on Sunday.
We should be able to expect that other groups who are traditionally spit upon (figuratively as well as lieterally) to say to the religious oppressors "Hey, you can't do that and get by with that any longer.!" Atheists have been working for gay rights, for racial and sexual equality alongside these oppressed groups. Why can't they tell us "C'mon along, let's get this shit straightened out once and for all?" Instead we get "Hey, your problems aren't as bad as ours." Or we get someone like Mecha who has been trying to make a _name_ for himself by repeating the same tired crap about how nasty Dawkins, Hitchens and PZ can be at times.
Sure, we can make common cause with other groups on civil rights, even religious moderates. But it doesn't mean we can't voice our opinions on religious issues. does it? Good post, Mike. (I mean Dunford, not me.)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed one year after 4 school girls were murdered in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. It was a time when Gov. George Wallace proclaimed, "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever". There were still blatant signs of Jim Crow in the form of segregated drinking fountains, store entrances, theaters, etc. And this was the tip of the blatant discrimination.
To argue a lawyer-ed defense of non government intervention in the private sector on supposed philosophical principles would be stupid and would demonstrate the ignorance of a bloody and shameful time in America.