Atheists More Mistrusted Than Rapists

Image from Flickr, by Markhillary

I recently posted the following statistic: 67% of Americans said they would vote for a homosexual candidate for president, but only 49% said they'd vote for an atheist. Americans like or trust homosexuals more than atheists, which is good news for gays (our society seems to be getting a little less homophobic), but terrible news for atheists, who must continue to congregate in dark alleyways and seedy bars.

Tom Rees writes that “atheists are a pretty disliked bunch of people in North America. Most atheists will be aware of polling data that puts them at the bottom of the loathing pile.” He goes on to describe an interesting experiment by Will Gervais (University of British Columbia, Canada), in which test subjects were told about “Richard,” who got into an accident, but only pretended to leave his actual address and then later found a wallet and took out the money, throwing the wallet in the garbage.  Test subjects were most likely to presume he was also an Atheist, with Rapist being a close second, while few believed he was also a Christian or a Moslem.

In another version of the experiment, Richard was described as a disgusting person rather than, untrustworthy. This time test subjects did not associate Richard with atheism, suggesting that people’s negative perception of atheists stems from distrust, and not disgust.

According to Rees, Gervais found that the level of distrust is correlated with the strength of belief that supernatural monitoring helps to enforce good behavior. Therefore, the greater one’s belief in God, the more likely they are to distrust atheists. So the statistic that only 49% of Americans would vote for an atheist should not be so surprisingly, considering how religious our society is.

Gay Agenda or Teaching Tolerance?

In a move that has pissed off religious conservatives, California state senator Mark Leno (Democrat from San Francisco) proposed a bill in December that would require textbooks to include gay history and portray it “in a positive light.” With all the recent media coverage of bullying and gay suicides, the time would seem ripe for this bill. However, homophobic parents and religious leaders are vowing to fight it.

In 2008, a lesbian student at Jesse Bethel High School in Vallejo, California, filed suit with the American Civil Liberties Union accusing the local school district of discrimination. As part of the settlement, administrators recently agreed to show films and assign homework depicting same-sex families, starting with elementary school-aged students.

In November parents and religious leaders attacked the school board for “pushing their gay agenda” on their innocent children, irate that their kids would be forced to hear such terrible words as “gay” and “lesbian,” all paid for by their tax dollars. However, Leno’s legislation does not call for any curriculum related to sexuality or sex education. Rather, it is more akin to requiring an accurate and sympathetic portrayal of African American or female historical figures.

Many parents believe they have the right to control everything their children hear or experience, a notion that is both ludicrous and unhealthy. There is no way to prevent a child from hearing the word lesbian and why try? It won’t stop a child from becoming gay or cause a straight kid to suddenly convert. It encourages ignorance, fear and bigotry. But if parents really are so concerned, then they need to place their kids in a private parochial school or home school them, and not expect the rest of the world to roll over for them. The job of public schools is to help children understand reality, not to shelter them from it. We don’t ignore the Holocaust, slavery, genocide of Native Americans or Japanese internment simply because they are painful or difficult to discuss (though history textbooks have done a remarkable job of obfuscating these events).

In the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), teachers introduce words like “gay” and “heterosexual,” beginning in kindergarten. At Mission High School in SFUSD, there are school assemblies to honor Gay Pride Month. There are now 4,000 Gay-Straight Alliance clubs across the nation. Many schools have also performed the Laramie Project, a play about Matthew Shepard, a gay college student in Wyoming who was killed in a homophobic attack.

Texas Schools Block GSA By Banning All Clubs

What Could Be More High School-Gay Rugby? (by ukhomeoffice)

Flour Bluff Intermediate School District, in Corpus Crispi, Texas, has shut down all extracurricular clubs in order to avoid allowing a Gay-Straight Alliance on one of the their campuses. The move comes in the aftermath of a veto by the school principal of a request by senior Bianca "Nikki" Peet's to start a GSA. In support of Peet, Texas A&M’s own GSA called for a protest on Monday, 2/28. Another protest is planned for tomorrow at 9 am.

The federal Equal Access Act requires all schools receiving federal funds to offer fair opportunities for students to form extracurricular groups, regardless of religious, political and philosophical leanings. The Flour Bluff district has argued that it does not have to follow this law. Flour Bluff High principal James Crenshaw asserts that the school has the discretion to approve (or ban) any club. Flour Bluff had approved a Christian Athletic organization, but not the GSA. In a valiant display of democratic values, it is now banning gay and Christian clubs equally.

The ACLU entered the fray the week, giving Flour Bluff until Wednesday to approve the GSA or face a lawsuit.

The Fred Phelps Circus: Coming to a School Near You

The Reverend Fred Phelps sent his God Hates Fags.com circus to my school. As expected, there were only three of them, while close to fifty former students and community members counter demonstrated peacefully across the street. Where were the current students and teachers, you ask? They were cloistered in the central courtyard of our school, eating donuts provided by the administration, having a safe, litigation-proof pep rally against hate.

Don’t get me wrong. A pep rally on campus is one of many fine responses, but plenty of teachers and students, including the Gay-Straight Alliance, wanted to hold a counter demonstration in front of campus, as a public display of our opposition to bigotry and homophobia.As the date of the protest got closer, however, more and more teachers were expressing reservations about being out front. People who had initially supported the counter demonstration were now arguing that any presence at all was just giving the bigots what they wanted. Others were concerned that by being in front of campus we would be giving the green light to students who, as everyone knows, have no impulse control and would certainly do something stupid, like hitting a bigot or throwing things at them.

The change in opinion on campus followed a series of administrative emails and emergency faculty meetings, all of which echoed the same story: “These people are lawyers who deliberately provoke people in order to sue them. We need to keep our students away from them. Besides, their ideas are so far from the mainstream that they are best ignored.” Yet their primary message is that homosexuality is evil, which is not only a mainstream idea, but one that has inspired a national dialog in the wake of several well-publicized suicides by gay youth.

My colleagues mostly bought the argument that Phelp’s cult funds itself through lawsuits. While this is a popularly held belief, there is little evidence to support it. The truth is that nearly every one of Phelp’s eleven children is a successful lawyer. They all donate heavily to his church. There have also been several successful lawsuits against his organization, and only a few in his favor, which would make it a very insecure funding source.

Staff also bought into the stereotype that teenagers are impulsive and irresponsible and would likely get themselves into trouble if allowed to exercise their free speech rights. While there are certainly some students at our school who would be inclined to assault the bigots, they had been well trained over the preceding week to not engage with them. More significantly, the actual protest was three blocks from campus. The police had set up barricades separating the protesters from the counter protesters and were not allowing anyone from either group to get near each other. The actual risk to the students in front of campus was negligible.

We had a wonderful opportunity to teach students about free speech, free assembly, solidarity and protest. It was a chance to discuss how free speech means that even crazy ideas get to be expressed, notions like government death panels or teachers unions are destroying public education, but when such ideas are unopposed, eventually people believe them. Instead, we reinforced the ideas that teenagers are fragile, untrustworthy and must be sheltered from all risk.