To Fight Religious Monuments, Atheists Plan Their Own Symbols By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Atheists unveiled the nation’s first public monument to secularism outside a county courthouse in Florida last week — a 1,500-pound gray granite bench engraved with quotations extolling the separation of church and state. The group American Atheists said it had decided to put up its own monument only after failing to force Bradford County to remove the six-ton statue of the Ten Commandments that a Christian group had put up nearby. The atheist group has vowed to erect 50 more such monuments around the country on public sites where the Ten Commandments now stand alone. It says that an anonymous donor will foot that bill — the monument in Florida cost about $6,000 — and that it is hearing from atheists who are already offering to serve as plaintiffs in lawsuits if there is opposition and lead the charge in their communities. “True equality means all or none,” said Ken Loukinen, a retired firefighter in Florida who volunteers as director of state and regional operations for American Atheists. “Christianity has had an unfair privilege for at least the last 150 years. We want to level the playing field by stripping them of privilege, and bringing them to equality with all other ideologies.” The atheists’ monument-building campaign is a new tactic in a long-running battle over the boundary between church and state. Having failed to persuade the courts that it is unconstitutional for a private organization to put up Christian monuments on government property, the atheists figured they should get in the game. But building monuments to atheism from sea to shining sea is not really their goal. They figure that once atheists join the fray, every other group under the sun will demand the same privilege — including some that Christians might find objectionable, like pagans and Satanists. In the end, the atheists hope, local governments and school boards will decide that it is simpler to say no to everyone. “It’s a very smart tactic,” said Charles C. Haynes, the director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum in Washington, “because by countering the message, they make it unpleasant for people who want religious messages in the public square, and less likely that they will push for them.” “I’m seeing a very messy and crowded public square, and I think we’re going to get more and more of these kinds of conflicts where people who feel they’ve been excluded want to be heard,” said Mr. Haynes, who added that he prefers crowded public squares that welcome religious diversity rather than empty ones. The controversy in the town of Starke, Fla., began in May 2012 when the Community Men’s Fellowship, a local Christian group, put up an imposing black granite Ten Commandments monument on the National Day of Prayer in front of the Bradford County Courthouse. Two weeks later, atheists mounted a protest and sued the county, calling the monument a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which forbids government sponsorship of religion. The county at first asked the Christian group to remove the Ten Commandments, but its members threatened their own lawsuit. The law was on their side, Mr. Haynes said. Courts have ruled that while government entities may not sponsor displays of religion, private groups can sponsor religious displays on public property. The county, the Christian group and American Atheists then entered into mediation. The county decided to declare the space a “free speech zone,” and the atheists proposed their own monument, said Mr. Loukinen, who participated in the mediation. (Representatives of the men’s fellowship could not be reached for comment, but posted on their Facebook page that “God worked this out.”) There are hundreds of Ten Commandments monuments and plaques across the country, many erected in the 1950s and ’60s by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a charitable group based in Grove City, Ohio. “We would perhaps defend our right to keep our Ten Commandments statues where they are if that’s where people want them,” said Nancy Schlagheck, the order’s marketing and communications director. “Would we battle other people? I can’t answer for that, but I can’t foresee it.” In Starke, the atheists’ monument is dwarfed by the Ten Commandments. It was designed by Mr. Loukinen and Todd Stiefel, an atheist activist and the benefactor who paid for it. (The anonymous donor who has promised to pay for 50 more is not Mr. Stiefel, said David Muscato, the public relations director for American Atheists.) At one end of the six-foot-long granite bench is a four-foot-tall square-top pillar bearing quotations from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists in 1963. “It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [writing the Constitution] had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven,” Adams is quoted as saying. This week, the atheist monument was already drawing visitors. Teenagers in a summer camp from New Hope Baptist Church in Mayo, Fla., about 75 miles away, gathered around it and bowed their heads in prayer. For hours, no one ventured to sit on the atheist bench until David Roberson and a friend arrived from Tampa. Mr. Roberson declared it “fantastic” and took photographs of his friend posing on the bench. “It’s very inviting,” said his friend, Maria, a nurse who did not want to give her last name because she said she was afraid of retaliation from Christians. “It’s hands on, to include people rather than exclude.” Chad Reddish, who is from Starke, was not so enthusiastic. “This is something we thought we would never experience in a small town,” he said. “It points out how many people don’t believe in God, and have different opinions.”
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 19:21:55 +0000
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