Discrimination Against Atheists?

This morning's New York Times has a big piece up on the trend toward more vocal activism among American atheists (via Memeorandum):

They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.

They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.

Notice that?

Atheists are hitching their wagon to the radical gay rights agenda, which is seen by many as achieving greater respectability, although that's mostly in the courts and in the far-left media and netroots fever swamps.

What's interesting is the explicit victimology in play here. Forty-five years after the passage of the most sweeping civil rights legislation in American history - and the subsequent expansion of rights and opportunities to millions of Americans previously subjugated by genuinely archaic hierarchies of race, class, and gender - there remains a few groups who will continue to mine the emotions of guilt-ridden citizens who cling to a "reparations mindset" on civil rights.

Atheists are not an oppressed class, but you wouldn't know it from the Times' piece. But observe how Tristero takes up the "prejudice" banner to hammer even more aggressively the bogus discrimination line:

Despite their numbers - or perhaps because of them - atheists today are often the victims of genuine discrimination. It is impossible for an avowed atheist to hold high national office and, despite Obama's oft-noted shout out to non-believers at his Inaugural, the entire ceremony was a religious love-fest. True, I wouldn't have missed Rev. Joseph Lowery's address for anything, but seeing the vile, lying Rick Warren up there was mega-creepy.

So it is good, extremely good, that atheists and atheism have gained so much national status. And hopefully, atheism as an ethics and a belief system will evolve to the point where no one feels they need to go out their way to make excuses for assholes like this simply because they affirm the non-existence of God.

Note something strange here: Tristero's calling Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, an asshole. But why? Harris' work is right up there with Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) in the popular pantheon of secularism and anti-religion. Shouldn't Tristero be recommending Harris rather than scourging him as an "asshole."

Well, no, actually. Tristero's either totally ignorant of Harris' writings - see, for example, "There is No God (And You Know It) - or he's blogging too fast to take a moment to check the guy's biography. Most likely, he's just totally intolerant of anyone making the case for torture, since Tristero's link for Harris goes to his piece, "In Defense of Torture."

I just take all of this as exemplary of the program of intolerance and rigid ideologism on the left (and Tristero's blogging at Digby's Hullabloo, a bastion of far left-wing radicalism).

This is what these people are about. Atheism is good, if it gets you closer to your goal of completely eliminating faith in the public square. That eventuality, of course, bolsters the gay radical agenda, so it's all of a piece when you think about it.