Following visit yesterday to mosque FFRF to Obama: Please welcome nonreligious to “American Family”

February 4, 2016

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sent the letter, below, today to President Barack Obama (on the same day he addressed the National Prayer Breakfast). Or read as PDF here.

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Re: Please also welcome nonreligious to the "American family"

Dear Mr. President:

To help counter anti-Muslim bigotry, you spoke at a mosque yesterday. Last week, you spoke at the Israeli embassy and, in a show of solidarity with the Jewish minority, said, "I, too, am a Jew." It is laudable for the President to embrace citizens of all colors and religious viewpoints as being part of "one American family" and to caution citizens not to be "bystanders to bigotry." But there is one U.S. minority that has been consistently excluded from such notice: nonreligious Americans.

We respectfully invite you, in your final year in office, to do something no American president has ever done: reach out to secular America. Such attention from the Office of the President would demonstrate that freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and rationalists are accepted citizens. As you pointed out in your first inaugural address: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers."

On June 4, 2016, as you are aware, America's "Nones" will gather at the Lincoln Memorial for the Reason Rally, sponsored by major secular organizations, including Freedom From Religion Foundation. On behalf of our 23,500 members around the nation, we add our voice to those encouraging you to make a historic appearance at what will be the largest event for secular Americans. This would provide an ideal opportunity for the Office of the President to welcome and address tens of thousands of good citizens who reflect the 23 percent of the adult population who identify as nonreligious. "Nones" are the fastest growing segment in the U.S. population by religious identification. More than a third of Millennials — 35 percent — identify as nonreligious. In fact, "Nones" have recently surpassed Roman Catholics as the largest "denomination" in the United States.

Yet reprehensible prejudice and ubiquitous social stigmatization dog U.S. freethinkers, atheists and agnostics. Those of us who are nonreligious daily encounter unwarranted stereotypes, putdowns and assumptions that we cannot be good people or good citizens. A December 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Psychology found, appallingly, that atheists rank, with rapists, as least trustworthy!

http://ffrf.org/news/news-releases/item/25699-ffrf-to-obama-please-welcome-nonreligious-to-american-family#sthash.TTP8n4mj.dpuf


"So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe — for example, if they say they are Catholic — do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?” Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!
Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.

"Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."

https://ladydifadden.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/transcript-of-richard-dawkins-speech-from-reason-rally-2012/

"And so if we’re serious about freedom of religion -- and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country -- we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths. (Applause.) And when any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up. And we have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/02/03/remarks-president-islamic-society-baltimore