Brad is scheduled to speak on August 26th at an interfaith event held by the Metropolex Atheists. However, the city of Fort Worth refuses to allow the group to advertise. Brad speaks with Nick Fish, president of the American Atheists, on how the City is creating a false pretext to prevent a group of non-religious Americans from advertising their event in public.
"Since at least 1998, Fort Worth has permitted nonprofit organizations to rent out space on downtown lamp posts to advertise events. These nonprofits include Kenneth Copeland Ministries and Texas Christian University. By its policy, the City has created a limited public forum under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and may not discriminate based on viewpoint, which includes atheism. The Supreme Court recently confirmed these protections in its 2022 decision Shurtleff v. Boston.
Nonetheless, the City of Fort Worth has denied Metroplex Atheists the right to advertise an event on combating Christian nationalism and protecting secular public schools, planned for August 26 at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens. Assistant City Manager William Johnson, who denied the banner display, claimed that the education event was not of “sufficient magnitude.” Yet nowhere does the City’s Banner Display Policy mention such a requirement."
https://www.atheists.org/2023/07/atheist-group-lawsuit-fort-worth/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by someone who I have had the opportunity to meet many times, several times I should say, probably in the last year or two, but have not had on the show, so we're rectifying a great injustice now by having him on, and that is Nick Fish, head of the American Atheist.
So Nick, thanks for being here.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm glad to be here.
So, it's always just great to cross paths with you, even though usually when we cross paths it's, well, in one instance you were running around like crazy because you were at the American Atheist Conference and you were kind of in charge of that.
So, a lot to do there.
The first time I met you was at a Christian nationalism conference at Yale, which was pretty heavy, and today I think is going to be pretty heavy, but It's always great to see you nonetheless.
So, here's what we're going to talk about today, friends.
You might have heard about this, you might have seen it, you might have not, but it seems pretty important to Nick and I, and that is this.
Fort Worth, Texas, late August, August 26th.
I'm actually scheduled to speak at an event for the Metroplex atheists who have been putting on events like this for years now.
They often link up with other groups, including religious groups.
So they're an atheist group, but they often link up with Jewish and Christian and Muslim groups and others.
And they were just denied this year from putting up the banners that would Advertise the event.
And so I want to just stop here and say, this is where the American Atheist stepped in.
They have filed a lawsuit.
So can I just stop here, Nick, and say to you, what's the basis of the lawsuit?
So the Metroplex Atheists can't put up their banners.
Why did the city say they can't do it?
Why does this seem wrong to you?
Well, yeah, there's a few components to that.
So the reason that the city gave is basically nothing.
They didn't really give any reason.
Metroplex Atheist first applied to hang up the banners back in November of last year and scheduled this event that you're speaking at around when there was availability to advertise for it, because obviously they think this is an important conversation, especially in a place like Fort Worth, especially in a place like Texas.
To discuss the threat of white Christian nationalism as it relates to threats to public education.
That's what the event is about.
And it turns out they're right.
It turns out that this is a necessary conversation in a place like Fort Worth where they didn't really get an answer for months and months and months.
They kind of reached back out in May and said, hey, what's going on here?
And eventually the city management got back to them and said, um, you've been denied, um, but we're not really going to tell you why.
Um, and we're not going to really tell you what changed, but the policy has been tweaked since you last applied.
And Metroplex Atheist kind of asked, okay, well, what changed?
And they said, well, you know, things have changed.
Uh, we're not, we don't really want to get into it.
It's completely made up.
It's a complete pretext for, in our view, denying Metroplex atheists the same opportunities that have been afforded to religious groups, to schools, to everyone else, to any non-profit that is within the area that is putting on an open-to-the-public event like this one is, that is a matter of public importance like this is.
And so, you know, the denial, the back and forth, the refusal to give any additional information, the shifting even fake reasons that they were giving that, you know, this event wasn't big enough was one of the things that the city alleged in sort of the verbal back and forth.
The problem with that idea is that, number one, Metroplex Atheists was never asked, hey, how many people are coming to your event?
Number two, when they previously did this in 2019 and put up banners advertising a similar educational event, they had more than 200 people in attendance.
So I don't know what scope or scale or size of event that the city really wants, but it's not communicated in the policy.
And even if it was, by the way, we don't think it would pass constitutional muster.
And in fact, a member of the Southern Methodist University School of Laws, you know, a legal professor over there who specializes in the First Amendment, speaking with a local TV station.
He's not affiliated with the case at all.
They reached out to him and they said, you know, what's your reaction to this?
And he said, you know, this size thing, that doesn't pass muster because it essentially limits the ability of people who have minority viewpoints or potentially unpopular speech from accessing a public forum, which is classic viewpoint discrimination, which is exactly the case in this.
And listen, we tried to work with the city.
We came to the city and said, you know, like, help us out here.
Tell us what the issue is and we'll get it fixed.
And our lawyers talked with them on behalf of Metroplex Atheists.
They couldn't give us a straight answer.
We never want to go to litigation because these things are expensive.
They waste taxpayer money.
But ultimately, the most important thing that we have to do here is protect the rights of our members, to protect the rights of local atheist groups as an advocacy organization, and to ensure the government is treating everyone with equality, equality under the law, and respecting the Constitution, which is exactly what we're doing here.
And so we have to go to court.
And that's the stage we're in right now.
One of the press releases that you put out at American Atheist notes that some of the groups that have been able to advertise their events in the past have been Kenneth Copeland Ministries, and I know many of you listening will be familiar with Kenneth Copeland, a somewhat infamous televangelist who I believe has a private jet and is worth quite a lot of money, but has some incredibly Shall we say conservative Christian views on things.
Also, Texas Christian University has been able to advertise.
And yet, as you say, there's really no reasoning here.
Now, I wonder, Nick, if you might take us back to 2019 when there were people who complained about some of the things surrounding the Metroplex atheist event and the banners, but nonetheless, the mayor at the time Really kind of articulated a pretty good view of free speech and why it's important for everyone.
So, can you take us back to maybe some of the beginnings of why the city of Fort Worth would come to this, you know, this decision?
Yeah, you know, it actually goes back even further.
I think it was like 2014, the atheists in Fort Worth put up some banners on buses that said, you know, something along the lines of, you know, there's no God, don't worry about it, you know, have a good life, something like that.
There are, you know, a lot of people who don't believe in God.
And so, a religious group hired a truck to follow around a bus, and on the truck had a billboard that said, there is a God and, you know, you do need to worry about it.
So, I don't want to pretend that this is just like some new issue, but in 2019, the similar program, identical program, identical requirements, they were having an educational seminar, as we said.
They put up banners that said, in no God we trust.
And people just lost their minds about the idea that somebody would have a viewpoint different from them on matters of religion.
Go figure.
The mayor, to her credit at the time, this was Betsy Price, you know, wrote on Twitter and released a statement that said, while many of us may not agree with the message, the organization did follow policies and procedures and we must respect freedom of speech.
She's exactly right.
She was exactly right then, and the city's leadership today should listen to the mayor from, you know, four years ago and respect that message.
Because ultimately, what you do not want is to have city governments, to have government at any level, being able to make these, you know, sort of capricious decisions Solely based on vibes about whether or not they want to allow particular types of speech.
And it's a really dangerous place for us to be in as a country when the government is opening up a public forum and then saying, no wait, your views are too unpopular.
And by the way, we're talking about a viewpoint as atheists that represents anywhere between 5% and 10% of Americans and keep schools secular, keep God out of public schools, keep religion from mixing with public schools.
That's not a 5%, 10% position in the United States.
That's a 60%, 70% position in the United States.
The event that you're scheduled to speak in at the event that they're advertising is bringing together people from a variety of different religious backgrounds, including a Christian minister, by the way, because protecting secular public education, ensuring that children are not being indoctrinated with white Christian nationalism in our public ensuring that children are not being indoctrinated with white Christian nationalism in our public schools, that's an overwhelmingly popular viewpoint in the United States and not the sort of thing that
And so, you know, this is not Christians versus atheists.
This is not atheists attacking all Christians.
This is us saying white Christian nationalism is a threat to all of our rights, to all of our ability to have secular public schools.
It's a threat to free speech rights.
It's a threat to democracy.
That's what all of this ties in and it plays directly into the whole point of this event.
That Christian nationalism, by its nature, tries to silence dissent, tries to take away the opportunity to even expose it by using the levers of government to privilege and elevate one particular religious viewpoint and insulate it from criticism.
And that's exactly what's happening here, even if they're coming up with these, you know, fake pretexts, pretextual reasons for denying Metroplex atheists of application.
There's so much you said there that just to me strikes as really essential to note.
One is this is not... so A, atheists and non-religious people in the country are growing.
It's a growing group of people and still fighting as you are on the front lines every day for recognition, for rights, for representation.
Two, the event itself that is planned for August 26th, as you note, is one where there will be a Christian minister, a Jewish rabbi, and so on.
So this is something that Really, I think anyone listening should understand is not, as you just said, religious versus non-religious.
This is religious and non-religious people who want a secular government that is free from religion coming together for that purpose and one group of people who want their religion privileged in the government and implicated in government workings saying, no, no, no, no, we don't want to give that up and coming up with these, as you're saying, false pretexts for that.
So it's not religious versus non-religious.
It's not atheist versus Christian.
It's Americans who want American ideals and an American government that runs how it was meant to be, rather than those that want one group to be privileged.
This is a classic.
I mean, I get asked all the time, what is Christian nationalism?
And I think the shortest answer is a Christian nationalist is somebody who just wants the government to privilege Christians somehow.
And And this is a classic case of that.
I mean, it's not about anything more than we want to be privileged.
Let me go back to some of the comments from 2019 that I read.
There were people that said, I'm pretty offended.
There were people that said, you know, if I see a banner in Texas that says, in God, in no God we trust, I'm upset.
And I've lived in the South.
I've lived in Tennessee.
I've lived in Virginia.
I have a feeling for these kinds of contexts.
I know that when you go to the grocery store, one of the first things you get asked is, what church do you go to?
And that kind of stuff.
Where's your church home?
Where's your church from, Brad?
Right.
And I kind of look around like, "It's over there." Yeah, awkward.
Okay.
What do you say to the person who is quoted in some of these stories as saying, "I was actually pretty offended in 2019 when I saw the In Know God We Trust banner.
I know you have a very easy answer to this, but I'd love for you just to sort of say, What would you say to that person if they were standing in front of you right now?
Yeah, I mean, I'd ask that person why they're offended and to think, just to reflect on that.
Like, what is it specifically about atheists?
And this is something that we as atheists, as non-religious people, have to grapple with every single day.
this notion that our mere existence that's stating what we believe and what we don't believe, the idea that we believe that this is the one life we have to live.
It's not a dress rehearsal for anything else.
And so we have to treat people with dignity and respect right now and not just for a future reward, promise a future reward or threat of future punishment.
Why it is that us asserting our rights and trying to claim our equal position in a pluralistic society where, by the way, people are making competing mutually exclusive religious claims every single day about the nature of religion in this country.
And no one gets that bent out of shape when a Baptist puts up a sign that says something, you know, Baptist-y.
The Catholics aren't losing their minds about how it doesn't say anything about how, you know, about papal supremacy or whatever.
Or if the Catholic Church puts up a billboard that talks about, you know, the Trinitarian things, and then someone who's a Unitarian isn't losing their mind about how it's offensive, it's only when we say, hey, listen, I don't believe in any of this, in fact, that those folks are just absolutely bent out of shape, that they cannot grapple with it.
And Part of the reason that the people that we work with every single day, our folks who are on the ground, what they tell us is that so many of them were indoctrinated into this ideology, into this religion, into, you know, any, however you want to put it, from birth.
And they were told that atheists and being non-religious in of itself was an existential threat in a way that people who made competing religious claims
Aren't right that that simply being an atheist that living openly as an atheist and being a good person represents such an existential threat to the supposed monopoly that religion has or the people say that religion has on morality on how to live a good life on all of these things that it represents such a threat to their core identity that
People really lose their minds about it, that the mere mentioning that atheists are part of the fabric of American society, that we are your neighbors, we're your teachers, we're your police officers, we're your firefighters, we're whatever, the mere mention of that, it so attacks
A core view that they have, that it forces them to grapple with it in a way that they're really uncomfortable with, that it really undercuts a core part of their identity, a core thing that they were brought up to believe.
And it's why, you know, the word atheist is used as a slur against people who do believe in God, but, you know, are heretics or, you know, that believe a slightly different version of things.
I'll say, well, you might as well be an atheist if you believe that version of Christianity, right?
Like that's a common invective that was hurled at a lot of our people before they left religion.
So, you know, I don't want to pretend that things are hunky-dory everywhere in this country.
I mean, we did a really big survey of about 35,000 people in this country.
And what we found is that the experiences of atheists and other non-religious people living in rural or highly religious parts of the country was very different than what it's like for someone like me who lives in Philadelphia or somebody who lives in, you know, New York City or someone who even lives in like a big city in a quote-unquote New York City or someone who even lives in like a big So like somebody who's experienced in Indianapolis is not going to be the same as someone's experience in rural Indiana.
And so, and it's tough, you know, people experience tons of discrimination in their interactions with government, but also in their interactions with their coworkers, in their interactions with their families.
When people leave religion, not only are they often leaving behind the sort of support structures that religion is quite good at providing, you know, having a life crisis and people are there to bring you casseroles, right?
Like, I'm from the Midwest, that's how it works.
Not only that, but also people will turn around and say, you know, you're abandoning who you are.
You are leaving us behind.
You are the one that's abandoning us, and so we're going to push you out.
And that can cause people to not just lose the support structure because they're no longer members of the church, but also for people to proactively kind of cut out our members, our folks from their lives, which is a tremendous, just a tremendously damaging thing for people's sense of self, for their just a tremendously damaging thing for people's sense of self, for their loneliness, for, you know, we found that people were more likely to experience depression because if they experienced that sort
And so, you know, this is just indicative of that, that idea that for some reason, and for all of the reasons I just said, atheism or being non-religious or staking out our claim to an equal footing within the fabric of American society, people really get upset about that and confront that.
And so anybody who is feeling that way, I want to ask them, I want them to interrogate that feeling a bit and figure out why it is.
Because, you know, we often have this reaction as well, even with sort of progressive faith allies, where they say, well, you know, we wish you wouldn't use the word atheist because it's such an attack.
It's like, well, no, not really.
It's who I am.
You would literally never say that to a Catholic.
Like, oh, you know, listen, you shouldn't say you're a Catholic.
You should just call yourself Christian, right?
That doesn't work like that.
And taking away that identity from someone is a really big imposition.
And so we always want people who are willing to listen to interrogate that a bit.
For the people that are just, you know, are going to be offended I guess the short answer is, it's okay that you're offended.
I'm offended when people tell me that I'm going to hell and going to be subjected to eternal torture for the rest of my life, but I don't go around slashing banners and vandalizing your churches.
I deal with it because we live in a pluralistic society where everyone has free speech rights, everyone has religious freedom rights.
What I don't want is the government picking sides.
I want the government to stay neutral.
And if you can't be on board with that, then we have a problem because what you have a problem with is our system of government.
You have a problem with our constitution.
You have a problem with our core human values, our core human rights, and we're going to really disagree on that.
And, you know, let's figure out, let's talk through that a bit, but we're not going to negotiate on basic human rights like that.
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Well, there's famously this mantra from the Trump years, like, F your feelings.
I generally don't like that because I think what it says is, the way that people are feeling is less important than whatever else.
But in this case, I think there's really, and you just articulated it, there's really a line that says, look, Living in a pluralist society means, at times, being uncomfortable.
And I think Christians, specifically evangelical Christians, specifically evangelical Christians in the South, specifically white evangelical Christians in the South, are not used to being uncomfortable in that way.
And so, when there's a sense of discomfort, the response is, well, this must be wrong, or this shouldn't be allowed, rather than saying, I'm uncomfortable, but maybe that's part of what I You know, except living in a pluralist society that is based on the separation of church and state and so on.
I can point to so many groups, whether they are BIPOC Americans, whether they are, you know, Jewish groups in the Midwest or in the South, whether they are Muslim mosques in rural Oregon, whether they are atheists living anywhere in the United States, and all of those groups will tell you There are times we're uncomfortable because we're uncomfortable.
Like we are uncomfortable.
We're rarely the majority.
We often have to fight like misconceptions of who we are and what we do and how we live.
And we have to kind of deal with little microaggressions.
Discomfort comes.
This discomfort is just one that's like, there's a banner.
It doesn't have profanity.
It has.
Yeah.
No, not profanity.
It's just, it's there.
You don't like it.
Maybe look the other direction.
I don't know.
It'll be there for two weeks.
Move on.
There's no hate symbol.
There's no, like, there's no, like, symbol of hate on there.
There's no, there's no, like, middle finger.
There's no, like, you know, that's something that I think people don't understand is that in the United States and, you know, you can think this is a good idea, a bad idea, whatever.
There are different ways of doing free speech.
But here in this country, hate speech is protected speech under the Constitution, that people can be horrendously cruel and terrible under the law, you know, and that we don't want the government making those those determinations because the first target for government in and that we don't want the government making those those determinations because when someone like, you know, Ron DeSantis is running a state like Florida or Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running a state like Arkansas or Donald Trump is running the federal government.
But the first targets of that unpopular speech or the speech that they're going to term to be, you know, offensive is being critical of Christianity is is is drag queens or is someone talking about the fact that they are married to someone of the same gender, right?
That's what they're going to term as offensive or as obscene in some way, and it doesn't meet those definitions.
And so we have to be really careful about You know, wanting government to step in and shield us from offense or from even hate speech because the definitions there are super slippery.
And, you know, the United States has a really long tradition of keeping those lines of communication open.
But part of that bargain that we have, that cost that we have to pay as a society for not having government Stick its nose into that sort of thing.
And I'm sounding like a small government libertarian here a little bit.
And that's intentional because I think it appeals to something very core about our values as Americans.
And I talk about this all the time with my colleagues in Europe, that this is part of who we are as Americans, that we do value our ability to be free from government interference.
And they have state churches over there.
Forget that.
I don't want that at all.
I don't want those sort of speech codes where offending religious sensibilities, quote-unquote, is a criminal offense, which it is in multiple Western democracies that we would otherwise call secular, and yet they insulate religious criticism of religion.
They can ascribe a criminal penalty to that, and we don't want that.
Part of the cost of living in a society, of having this multi-religion, pluralistic vision of our society, is that you're going to be offended by people sometimes who are attacking, or you're perceiving as attacking, but all they're doing is saying what they believe.
That's the cost you have to pay.
It's tough sometimes, but I think it's worth it as a society.
The whole forget your feelings thing, we should be kind to one another.
We don't need the government enforcing that on us, and we certainly don't want the government picking and choosing sides when it comes to putting up a banner that says, keep God out of schools, right?
Like, all that that's doing is saying that they can turn around and say, well, only put the Baptist God into church or into schools, or only say this version of the Lord's Prayer, or we're only going to read this version of the Bible.
That's, I mean, when people talk about, oh, we should put prayer back into schools, like, which prayers?
When they talk about this is a Christian nation, which Christian?
They certainly, and this is better than anybody, they certainly don't mean the Christianity of, you know, Reverend Dr. William Barber or, you know, Jesse Jackson.
They mean the Christianity of Jerry Falwell Jr.
Which is a very different version of Christianity that, you know, I don't know what rating you have on this podcast, but we probably won't go into that.
His version of Christianity.
It's a very different version of a lot of things.
Yes, that's true.
So, yeah, I mean, everything you just said there, I appreciate and I appreciate, you know, the way that you talk about the need for protecting free speech, because as you say, atheists and other Other groups that are minoritized are going to feel the brunt of that first.
We see that all over the country already.
I don't think I need to explain that to people.
As we close, I'm wondering if this is a chance for you to tell some folks who are listening who are mainline Christians, who are Jewish or have some other religious affiliation, and they're not familiar with the American Atheist.
Yeah.
And they're wondering, well, what do they do anyway?
I had the chance to be at the National Conference of the American Atheists a couple months ago in Phoenix.
It was amazing.
Just friendliest, coolest conference.
Welcoming and people having just great discussions.
And one of those places, I'll say, Nick, that you go to a lot of conferences and sometimes there's some kind of status There's stuff going on, who are the famous people, and let's try to talk to them, and they're too cool to talk to others.
And the American Atheist Conference is just one where everybody's just talking to everybody.
And it could be a really famous author, it could be somebody who's just decided to come to the conference because they're the only atheists in their town in Georgia, but everyone's hanging out together.
And I just found that really cool.
You're the head of American Atheists.
Give us two minutes.
What do y'all do?
I'm so glad to hear you say that.
I mean, we work really intentionally to make sure that people have a welcoming experience at our conferences because we know that often it's the only time where a lot of these folks have walked into a room and not been othered, have not been sort of pushed to the margin on their religious identity.
And so we want it to be a really welcoming, positive experience.
American Atheist as an organization is entering its 60th year right now.
We sort of came out of the Supreme Court case back in 1963, the Shemp versus Abington School District, which was the Supreme Court decision that got rid of mandatory coercive school prayer.
And it was consolidated with a lawsuit brought by our founder, Madeline Murray O'Hare, in her school district with sort of a similar issue.
So we've been around for a long time.
And I'd say the last five or six years, we've really leaned in on supporting our local groups, supporting what's happening on the ground, working very closely with state level policymakers, filing litigation where appropriate to advance those particular policy goals.
What we're all about right now is minimizing religious harms.
We don't want people who are non-religious or people who are religious to be subjected to harms coming out of a religion that isn't their own.
So a great example of this is we just won a preliminary injunction in a case in West Virginia, and I won't get into the details of what all that means.
But basically, we have a gentleman who has been incarcerated in West Virginia, who, as a condition for parole, was required to attend a substance abuse treatment program.
Now, he's been sober.
He was sober through a secular alternative before he was incarcerated.
But, you know, he was in recovery and they wanted to continue that.
But the only option that was offered to him was a 12-step program, a 12-step program that was pervasively religious, that had prayers everywhere, that included the, you know, AA big book.
And there's a chapter in there that essentially talks about agnostics as fundamentally broken and, you know, destined to a life of alcoholism and loneliness if they don't find God.
And he is a model prisoner.
He's somebody who, if not for his failure to go through a pervasively religious program, would have been paroled back a year ago, two years ago now.
Um, and the judge essentially sided with us on every step of the way and said, all right, listen, West Virginia, this program that you've got in place here is unquestionably infringing on this guy's rights.
You need to take that off from his requirement to get parole because it's, it's crazy that he's having to go through this when over and over and over again, these programs have been found to be Coercively religious.
And there's nothing more coercive than locking somebody in jail in prison and saying, you can't get out until you say these words that profess a faith that you don't share.
And so that's just one example.
So we're not just filing lawsuits because this is the law of the land already.
People should be respecting this already.
The fact that we had to go to courts to enforce this, just like we have to go to court in Fort Worth We shouldn't have to.
But what we're doing is working on passing laws in the states to expand notice requirements, to expand transparency, so that when someone is sentenced, that there is a form that they have to be given, that there is a verbal statement, that there's a written statement, that there's on the record from the judge saying, hey, you're being that there's on the record from the judge saying, hey, you're being sentenced to as a condition of your interaction with the criminal You are being required to complete this program.
Here's one option.
It's AA or it's NA, and it's religious.
If you have an objection to this religious content, here are other alternatives, something like Life Ring or Smart Recovery.
Whichever one works best for you, you just need to do one of them.
We want people to know that they have that right.
And so, you know, we're working on that.
We're working on health care transparency, ensuring that when somebody goes to the doctor and they have an ectopic pregnancy, that if they go to a religious health care provider, that they're told right up front, hey, you have an ectopic pregnancy.
We will not we do not perform abortions here at this facility.
But you need to know for informed consent, for medical transparency, for medical consent, that that is the best course of treatment for you.
As it currently stands, in those hospitals, those healthcare providers that don't perform those services, they don't even mention it.
And so the problem with that is that people can't make an informed decision about their own health.
And then they have to go, you know, they find out later and they have to drive 60 miles, 100 miles away to the next hospital, especially for rural hospitals.
But we're working on these bills that will improve people's lives immediately and measurably, that don't take away anyone's freedom, that shouldn't be controversial, that all they do is expand knowledge, that ensure that people know the facts.
And so we're working on things like that.
Obviously, we're promoting understanding of atheists as well.
We've done big surveys, big reports about the experiences of Atheists in general, non-religious people in general, but also folks who are LGBTQ and non-religious, or people who are women and non-religious, people who are gender non-conforming and non-religious, people who are black and non-religious, and how those experiences vary depending on those different identities and where those things intersect, because people do experience discrimination or experience positive side effects or positive experiences.
Differently, depending on where they fall.
So, you know, there's a lot of work going on right now.
We, I encourage folks to check out our website.
It's just atheists.org.
Just give us a Google.
We've got a pretty good SEO.
So if you just Google atheists, you'll probably find us.
We've got a lot of, a lot of irons in the fire or pans on the burner, whichever, you know, metaphor you prefer.
A lot going on and we're really excited to have the opportunity to work so collaboratively with people of all different faiths and none.
to protect the rights of all Americans to be free from religious discrimination or religious coercion. - I'm disappointed you didn't say "Cast the rules in the oven." As a Midwesterner, yeah, they're going to not let me back into Michigan.
If I was from Wisconsin, that would have been the first thing.
If I was like Wisconsin or Minnesota, that would have been right there.
Because I'm from Michigan, there's a little bit more like auto industry, so, you know, irons in the fire, heavy industry.
Yeah, no, I can feel the people, I can feel the Midwesterners listening and giving you a pass right now, so you're good.
I really appreciate you giving us a little glimpse into the organization, because, you know, unfortunately, I think there are folks who still, when they hear the word atheist, they take it with a certain negative connotation.
And that could be even somebody who maybe left their evangelical faith two, three years ago, and they're kind of figuring out who they are.
But when they hear atheist, they still get a jolt, because that's what they've been trained to think.
When somebody hears that, oh, you're telling me the American atheists are out there trying to increase knowledge about the healthcare options for people, or make it such that if I'm a potential parolee, I have options as to the kinds of recovery programs I might be enrolled in, rather than the American atheists are using millions of dollars to destroy God and every religion possible!
That's their goal!
One of the things that we surveyed people on was like, hey, what should we be spending our time on?
What sort of issues should we be working on?
And I don't know that it's a fair perception that people had, but it certainly was a perception, is that we spend all of our time fighting about crosses on public land or Ten Commandment monuments or whatever.
And I don't want to pretend that those are okay.
Like having these enormous, like 40-foot Christian cross on public land, obviously it's a religious symbol.
Obviously, the symbols our government chooses to sort of represent us and choose like, quote unquote, unifying symbols.
If it's a Christian cross, it's not unifying.
But the things that we spend our time working on right now are the things that are literally life-threatening for millions of Americans, including things like access to reproductive health care, access to abortion, access to contraception.
You know, the basic human rights and human dignity of LGBTQ people, the ability of someone to access health care that isn't going to discriminate against them because of who they are, they love, or on the basis of the beliefs of the doctor or of, you know, the sort of abstract beliefs of the health care system where even the doctors are being constrained the sort of abstract beliefs of the health care system where even the doctors are being constrained from We're talking about very basic things here that quite literally deal with life or death.
I'm not trying to be flippant about it or oversell it, but we're talking about life and death.
There's a trial going on right now in Texas where abortion has been banned.
They were listening to testimony from women who were pregnant in Texas who were experiencing complications.
The state of Texas was cross-examining a woman so aggressively about a miscarriage that she had that they had to stop the trial because she vomited on the stand because she was so just torn up and just you know experiencing such trauma of losing a wanted pregnancy but then having to go through and continue with
the pregnancy that was non-viable because the doctors weren't able to perform an abortion that would help protect her life because the now non-viable fetus did still had cardiac activity and And this was a pregnancy that had no hope of continuing.
This is the barbarism that we're talking about when it comes to the injection of a particular type of religious ideology into American politics, into American health, into any number of areas of our lives.
I mean, the stakes are too high for us to be sort of quibbling over, well, do you call yourself a free thinker or do you call yourself an atheist?
Whatever label you use, we use the word atheist because that's who we are, because we think it's an inclusive word.
If you don't want to use that word, again, I'd ask you to interrogate why that is, but that's fine because we've got so much to do right now, and white Christian nationalism is infiltrating so many areas of our society, of our politics, of our laws, that we can't afford to just sit here and make this an entirely academic exercise.
I apologize to you as an academic.
How dare you?
No, but I know that you're out there doing things, like so many academics who work on this issue are.
It's not like, oh, we're just going to write a white paper.
We're out there talking about this stuff, and that's important.
That was going to be my comment, was one of the things I found so great about the American Atheist Conference in Phoenix a couple months ago was There was no discussion.
I heard no discussion and no one asked me about this and all of the conversations I had of, hey, are you a free thinker?
Are you an atheist?
Are you a humanist?
And the reason I thought that was good is because as you're saying, I am focused on the issues you're talking about.
I'm focused every week on this show, on LGBTQ issues, on systemic racism, on freedom from religion, religious freedom in the ways that it should be constructed, so on and so forth.
I don't want to, as an academic, I don't find any use in that.
I mean, I understand why people engage in those conversations, but I just think it's really great that here in a couple of minutes you're able to tell folks, not only are we doing this kind of work on the ground and these kinds of litigation efforts and so on, But we're not here to do the like debate about who's the real non-religious person and what label should you have and you know, let's put on the tweet and really argue about this.
It's really about helping people and I think that's what I think is good.
All right, we got to go.
You need to get out of here.
What are the best ways people can link up with your organization and with you yourself?
Yeah.
So, like I said, find us at atheists.org is our website.
That's the easiest way.
That's where you'll find sort of the clearinghouse of everything we're working on.
You can follow us on Instagram or threads at American Atheists or on the BIRD app at American Atheist without the S at the end.
We're also on Facebook.
We're on all your major, wherever you get your social media news, we're on all those things.
But, you know, keep up with the work that's going on.
If you are supportive of what's going on and the work that we're doing, we'd love to have you as a member.
We always really appreciate people chipping in because, you know, we don't have billionaire backers who are funneling money to Supreme Court justices on our behalf.
So what we have to rely on are everyday people who understand the stakes of these issues.
And so go to our website, sign up as a member, sign up for action alerts if you're not in a position to give.
We need people in all 50 states to help us do this.
We have a really fantastic group of advocates and volunteers and people who are our eyes and ears on the ground in states and state legislatures, at school board meetings, at all these things who let us know what's going on and keep us informed.
Because we have a lot of work to do and it is a finite number of people that we have and a finite amount of money that we have.
We are not Alliance Defending Freedom with just money falling from the skies.
We are sort of ragtag.
It may not be the best way to put it, but we're certainly scrappy and we really rely on the grassroots.
And I think we're really proud of that, that we don't have billionaires dumping piles of dump trucks of money on our front lawn.
Well, I'm glad you got the word scrappy in there because I really felt that when I was at the conference and I felt that just with all the colleagues and others I've met and now work with from American Atheist, people who are dedicated, who are energetic, who are doing this for a lot of reasons.
Some of them are Based on desire for justice and in addition to that, a desire for community, a desire for solidarity.
So it is really all of those things and more.
And I'll just say that I think maybe the city of Fort Worth might've shot itself in the foot because there's probably going to be more people at the event now It would have been.
I mean, I know when they signed me up to speak and they're like, how many people can you bring out?
I was like, I think I have a cousin in Texas and maybe an old friend.
They might come if I give them Uber money.
But now I think because of all of this hubbub, we're going to see people come out and be energized and enthused and it's going to be really good.
It's on every TV station right now.
I've done a bunch of interviews.
I've passed people along to you.
I know you've had people reach out to you from the media locally.
Like, this is what happens when they try to silence us.
Like you said, they shoot themselves in the foot because they're so focused on not allowing us to have our equal position in government.
And what ends up happening is it turns into this massive story and it blows up all over the place.
It accomplishes exactly the wrong thing.
It's the Streisand effect.
We should rename the Streisand effect the Christian Nationalist effect because it just, they absolutely draw so much attention while they're trying to be sneaky in the background and they end up just walking around with a giant megaphone or the one-man band drum thing with the, what's the word?
The cymbals.
The cymbals and just everything and making a racket because they can't help themselves, you know?
They're so just ham-fisted.
No, I'm getting ready now.
I got like two costume changes.
I got like a couple of t-shirt cannons.
We're going all out.
Yeah, we're going all out.
Some magic tricks.
All right.
As always, friends, find us at Straight White JC.
Find me at Brad, Bradley Onishi.
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