Secular director visits

Nontheists are the only minority in the United States still looked down upon in society, said Lori Lipman Brown, the director of the Secular Coalition for America.

“From claiming that we’re immoral, depraved and unethical, to making atheist military heroes invisible . . . Americans are not shy about admitting that they feel comfortable treating nontheistic Americans as less patriotic, less respectable and less deserving of equal treatment than any other minority,” she said.

Brown spoke to a crowd of 30 students and members of the public Tuesday in the Jot Travis Student Union’s Pine Lounge as a part of the Nevada Speakers Series put on by Flipside.

Brown said she is best known for “making sex legal” by authoring a bill to overturn Nevada’s sodomy laws during her tenure as a state senator. The sodomy laws classified consensual sex not for the purpose of procreation as a felony, she said.

Brown now works as the director of and lobbyist for the Secular Coalition of America. Some of her recent fights include trying to remove a Department of Defense spending bill amendment that would allow military chaplains to try and recruit soldiers to the chaplain’s religion, she said.

“The chaplains who lobbied for this amendment claimed that their particular religion required that they work at all times and in all places to save all non-Christians,” she said.

Brown said she also fought against religious hiring discrimination in the federal Head Start bill. Religious hiring discrimination happens when a church refuses to hire qualified people because they do not hold the same religious beliefs. The Head Start program gives grants to organizations to help lower-class children and families, according to the Head Start Web site.

If Congress stripped the bill of its religious hiring discrimination protection, a single mother could be denied a job because of her unmarried status, Brown said.

She said she lobbied against repeated attempts to strip the Head Start bill of protection against religious hiring discrimination.

The Head Start bill passed with its protection against religious hiring discrimination intact when Congress restarted the program for the first time in six years, she said.

In addition to the Head Start bill, Brown and others currently are working to investigate and correct the issues of President Bush’s faith-based initiatives.

“Those who believed they were following the administration’s wishes began a concerted effort to shift social service grants away from proven secular organizations,” she said.

She said she also fought against the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment brought before Congress last year because of its theological implications.

“We must not impose a theological definition on a civil contract,” she said.

Brown ended her speech with an appeal to the members of the audience.

“And vote,” she said. “You are living in a state where many races are decided based on a handful of votes.”

http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2007/10/16/secular-director-visits/