Working Together For a Better America, One Minority At A Time

The ancient Druids made a fatal mistake. They were a proud people who lived in tribal clans, and each member of each clan knew all too well that their clan was the best – more special, closer to the gods and trees, than the other clans – and so they were quite often waging war against each other. It was sort of like baseball used to be to Americans before we discovered the Middle East.

Anyway, the Druids were subsequently caught with their pants (or robes, probably, to be more specific) down when the Romans showed up. Many of the tribes capitulated to the Christian Romans because of clan leaders who didn’t want to fight them or accepted bribes for peacefully handing over their brethren and clansmen to be Roman slaves. But they did not ask the other clans for help. By the time the clans learned to set aside their differences and pride and fight the Romans together, it was far too late.

Why am I talking about the ancient Druids? Because I worry that minorities in America could be making the same mistake.

My girlfriend is on the board of Seattle Atheists, a local activist atheist nonprofit organization. They do all sorts of wonderful things, including (but certainly not limited to) fundraisers for Seattle Children’s Hospital, regular blood donations, and an educational yet silly annual celebration of Darwin’s birthday.

Recently, they decided to have an atheist coming out day and sought to share National Coming Out Day with the gay community. When Jami asked me my opinion on this, I thought it was a fantastic idea – what better way to show solidarity with their homosexual members and neighbors than by using the day to point out that we all have closets to come out of; that little controversial part of ourselves that removes us from the mainstream. Aside from this, I tend to feel like it’s past time that minorities stop feeling so damned individually special and start doing more to work with other minorities that not only often support each other, but also work toward many of the same ends for their own groups.

Unfortunately, Jami was asking my opinion because there was an uprising once word of the plan got out. Even atheist gays (gaytheists) were upset with the idea of sharing a gay day with good, supportive, LGBT-friendly folk and called the organizers thieves and accused them of devaluing and desecrating LBGTQ Coming Out Day. They ended up moving Atheist Coming Out Day to the following day. We were baffled.

Our own experiences with religion and ongoing dealings with Christian family members aside, what we see in the media every day is that the atheist cause and the gay civil rights movement are nearly inseparable. Atheists may not be dealing with overtly anti-atheist legislation (there is no Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for atheists in the military and nobody – to my knowledge anyway – is trying to prevent atheists from marrying), but what atheists do deal with is something far more subtle: a culture that says that being an atheist means having absolutely no moral code, no divine reinforcement of good behavior or deterrent to bad behavior. It may not be reaching the evening news, but parents who come out of the atheist closet to their Christian spouses often find themselves abandoned by their spouses and families as well as lifelong friends. In the Bible Belt, it’s not uncommon for atheist parents (much like pagan parents all over the country) to lose custody and even visitation rights to their children once it is revealed to the judge that they are nonbelievers.

These sorts of situations should sound, unfortunately, all too familiar to the gay community. How many of us have lost our families and childhood friends once we came out of the closet? But I’m not sure if gays even really understand that atheists have these problems. Even where the problems aren’t as blatant as this, there are the little things that crop up, like Christians not wanting to say Merry Christmas to a known atheist, or negative reactions from new religious acquaintances who obliviously ask what church a person goes to as if it never occurred to them that a person might not go to church. I equate this with a new acquaintance offhandedly referencing my husband or boyfriend without even a second thought that I might not have one even if I were straight.

However, even aside from these blatant issues of homo- and atheist phobias, there is an even greater, unifying issue in that we are two groups working for ostensibly the same thing – social acceptance by the mainstream. Not that we necessarily want to be part of the mainstream; we just don’t want to be persecuted by it.

Additionally, there is this small, perhaps silly point: Gays have Gay Pride Month in June, and GLBT History Month in October, as well as National Coming Out Day. Do we not have enough special gay times that we can’t share one frigging day?! Are we so special that we should lay claim to the whole damn calendar in much the same manner that Christians have claimed the entire month of December for Christmas to the degree that acknowledging any of the other holidays going on during that time is considered anti-Christian?

The problem is that atheists and gays could both use a little help in fending off the Tea Partiers, the LDS church, religious fundamentalists, and corporations that are turning America into a corporate theocracy that doesn’t like anyone who thinks or lives outside of the big box. These groups have blurred the line that allegedly separated church from state so much that we often have trouble distinguishing between the two anymore. There may not be more people in these groups, as so many like to purport that they’re just small bands of crazies, but they have learned and are learning to work together, and as long as we continue to look out for our own individual special interests and disregard the opposition as passionate but lunatic, we will lose.

We will lose rights we haven’t gotten yet and rights we’ve always supposedly had. Institutionalized persecution of gays, nonbelievers, brown people (who actually aren’t a minority at all), and women will be allowed to become socially acceptable because, like the ancient Druids, we were too focused on making sure that everybody knew how special we were that we lost sight of the fact that all of our disparate groups actually form a majority that could have done something to prevent it if only we’d learned to work together first. Coming Out Day isn’t about being gay, it’s about strength in the face of adversity and the sociocultural acceptance of real people who are tired of being shoved to the edges of society. It seems to me that that’s something worth sharing a day over.