March 2007

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
By George Felis

http://www.thenewhumanist.com/George%20Felis.htm

"There is one group of American citizens that is more widely maligned,
mistrusted, and even hated than any other identifiable group. In
response to survey questions such as "[This group] does not at all
agree with my vision of American society" and "I would disapprove if
my child wanted to marry [a member of this group]," one group leads
both categories by a wide margin. (Read the study here.) According to
other surveys (including this Gallup poll from February 2007),
Americans say that they would vote for a woman, black, Jew, Mormon, or
even a homosexual for president more willingly than they would vote
for a member of this group.

Who are these widely-disliked people? In a country where putting
homophobic "marriage protection" amendments on the ballot has replaced
race-baiting (the infamous "Southern Strategy") as the preferred
getting-our-voters-to-the-polls technique of the political right, what
group rates below gays in the eyes of the electorate? Are they
murderers? Lepers?

As it turns out, the people Americans on the whole have such
consistently negative attitudes about are... atheists. Many different
lines of evidence show that people who lack belief in any god or gods
are subject to more knee-jerk prejudice than every other group anyone
has thought to compare them with. As an atheist myself, I have the
dubious honor of belonging to a despised minority, possibly the most
despised minority in the country. I suspect that a large proportion of
the readers of The New Humanist.com share this dubious honor with me -
and if so, I encourage you to be more open about it. Talk openly and
often about your lack of belief in any god or gods: Come out of the
godless closet and let people know who you really are.

Why would you want to do such a thing? The upside of prejudice against
atheists is that atheism isn't an identity worn on the outside for all
to see, like race or gender. Atheists can be invisible as such, if
they so choose. But I'm not so sure that really constitutes an upside:
Invisibility has its benefits, perhaps, but the costs are far greater.

Consider the strides in acceptance that gay men and women have made in
the past few decades. It would be a mistake to look at current debates
over gay marriage just as evidence of homophobia, because they are
also a sign of how far we have come as a nation in accepting gays as
fellow humans and fellow citizens, deserving equal rights and fair
treatment. How so? There were no debates over gay marriage fifteen or
twenty years ago because no one considered legally sanctioned
marriages between two men or two women to be even the remotest of
possibilities. Now, the general attitudes toward homosexuality have
improved to such a degree that gay marriage is not only a possibility,
it is an inevitability whose opposition grows increasingly shrill and
frantic. Even an appallingly conservative Supreme Court finally felt
compelled to strike down sodomy laws in 2003, where a slightly more
liberal court had sustained such laws only seventeen years earlier.

How has this progress in ordinary, basic human respect for gay men and
women been made? A significant portion of the progress is due to
openness: The "silence = death" campaign against HIV, and countless
personal choices by many individual gay men and women to be open about
their own identities have created a culture where gay men and women
are no longer invisible. Increasing numbers of openly gay citizens and
celebrities throughout American society make anti-gay bigotry more and
more difficult to sustain. Why? How? It's fairly easy for humans to
hate an alien "other" exemplified only by stereotypes and assumptions.
It becomes much more difficult to hate the "other" when your parent,
child, sibling, aunt, neighbor, friend, co-worker, doctor, or teacher
- or one of your favorite singers or actors - openly and proudly
belongs to that "other" group. When you find that you not only know a
gay person, but that you've liked that person for years before
learning that he or she was gay, your perceptions of gay people almost
inevitably change: The imagined devil horns come off, the perception
of alien-ness and its accompanying fear is undermined, and the gay
person takes another step in your eyes towards becoming simply a
person - one who happens to be gay.

Of course, gay men and women still have a long way to go, and
transgendered and bisexual people have even further to go. But more
and more Americans every day learn to look at gay men and women and
simply see people - fellow humans, fellow citizens, just folks. In the
Gallup poll I mentioned in the first paragraph, 55% of those surveyed
said that they would be willing to vote for an otherwise qualified
Presidential candidate who was homosexual. Obviously, it would be
better if that number were closer to 100%, if no American would even
take such an irrelevant consideration into account when voting (or at
least thinking about voting) for an elected official of any kind. But
just as obviously, 55% is better than 26% - the proportion who said
they'd vote for a homosexual president in 1978, the first year the
people at Gallup even thought to ask the question.

In contrast, only 45% said they would vote for an atheist president in
this year's poll, which is actually lower than the best ever 49%
response to the same question in 1999. If gays still have a long way
to go, those of us who don't believe in the existence of any god or
gods seem to have even further to go - and we seem to be going in the
wrong direction. Of course, I speak purely in terms of public
perception, and in no way imply that the struggles of gays and
atheists are otherwise equivalent: Atheists have the full protection
of the Constitution (the "no religious tests for public office" clause
of Article VI, the "establishment" and "free exercise" clauses of the
1st Amendment) and have not been widely denied basic rights and human
dignity outside the realm of rhetoric - so far, anyway.

Still, the analogy has power. As was previously the case with gays,
overwhelmingly the people who wouldn't vote for an atheist president
don't even know any atheists. Or rather, they don't think they know
any atheists. They almost certainly do know atheists - but being aware
of the prejudice and bigotry against them, those atheists quietly keep
their non-belief to themselves, they remain invisible. Similarly, as a
matter of simple demographics it is certain that many of those parents
who wouldn't want their child to marry an atheist actually have an
atheist child and simply don't know it: They fear and perhaps even
hate atheists, but surely they love their children. If they are never
confronted with that contradiction, they will never have the impetus
to overcome their irrational fears. Again, the similarity between gay
and atheist "coming out" is clear.

As ignorance breeds fear, knowledge breeds acceptance. The only way to
undermine the knee-jerk fear of atheists so many people have is to let
the fearful know that they have nothing to be afraid of, that "those
people" they fear are already everywhere and aren't really scary at
all: We are teachers and doctors, sons and daughters, taxi drivers and
checkout clerks, mothers and fathers, fellow citizens one and all.

We are also elected representatives. In what may prove to be one of
the more important strokes against the invisibility of atheists in
America, Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.) on March 12, 2007 became
the only openly declared non-theist in Congress. Not the only
non-believing Representative currently in office, mind you, but the
only openly declared unbeliever ever to occupy a seat in the House or
Senate. The Constitution may forbid religious tests for public office,
but clearly the electorate applies its own test - and so candidates
who may or may not even believe in private work very diligently to
out-pray each other in public, to the vast detriment of our political
climate. (Nothing is sacred in American politics, but much is
repellently sanctimonious.)

I say let us follow the brave example of Representative Stark, and the
analogous example of many millions of openly gay men and women, and
come out of the closet as unbelievers. Only if we throw off the
stifling cloak of invisibility and come out in the open for all to see
do we have any chance of altering those prejudiced perceptions of
atheists, of overcoming people's ungrounded fears about who atheists
are, fears that our values and concerns are somehow alien or
threatening even though they haven't the slightest idea what those
values and concerns might be. Of course, the most central values and
concerns of atheists are substantially same as every other human's -
life and love, children and work, death and taxes, all that jazz.

Besides, you know you often find the closet dark and stifling, however
comfortable its protection may be on occasion.

Perhaps some day, more and more Americans will look at openly atheist
men and women and simply see people - fellow humans, fellow citizens,
just folks. Until that day, I would rather be seen as an atheist than
not seen at all. And if more people make the same choice I do, the
chances are vastly improved that one day I won't be seen as an atheist
at all. I'll be seen simply as a person - one who just happens to be
an atheist.

George M. Felis is an upright primate with an overdeveloped neocortex.
Amongst the things he does not take seriously are himself and other
people's religious beliefs. He is also a Ph.D. student in philosophy
at The University of Georgia, and he's trying to take that a bit more
seriously so he can finish his dissertation and get on with life
already."

Copyright 2007 The New Humanist.com