At a meeting of the Winter Garden City Commissioners in Florida, Mayor John Rees had an atheist forcibly removed by uniformed police officers for refusing to stand during an invocation and the Pledge of Allegiance. Before the removal, he drew attention to the man and criticized him for failing to adhere to the norms of the city leaders - singling him out as an "other". There is video of the incident.
The City Commissioners have since voted to strike the invocations from their agenda, opting for a moment of silence in its stead. Rees, incidentally, voted against the change. That's a great step on the part of the City Commissioners, but what strikes me is that in the time between the initial incident and the new policy, there was little news coverage outside of atheist blogs.
Can you imagine the media coverage if a person of practically any religious faith were forcibly ejected from a government meeting for expressing his or her beliefs - through inaction, no less? I have to suspect it would be front-page news. Yet this story came and went with relative silence, from what I can tell. It's disheartening to think that explicit discrimination against nonbelievers isn't newsworthy. Part of the goal of the Drake Secular Legal Society is to increase the visibility and presence of the secular community. We mustn't resign ourselves to being ignored or mistreated by our government representatives.
What do you think? Read the full article here.
The City Commissioners have since voted to strike the invocations from their agenda, opting for a moment of silence in its stead. Rees, incidentally, voted against the change. That's a great step on the part of the City Commissioners, but what strikes me is that in the time between the initial incident and the new policy, there was little news coverage outside of atheist blogs.
Can you imagine the media coverage if a person of practically any religious faith were forcibly ejected from a government meeting for expressing his or her beliefs - through inaction, no less? I have to suspect it would be front-page news. Yet this story came and went with relative silence, from what I can tell. It's disheartening to think that explicit discrimination against nonbelievers isn't newsworthy. Part of the goal of the Drake Secular Legal Society is to increase the visibility and presence of the secular community. We mustn't resign ourselves to being ignored or mistreated by our government representatives.
What do you think? Read the full article here.