Lori Lipman Brown, a former Nevada state senator, has been made the first-ever lobbyist for non-religious Americans by the Secular Coalition for America. She has a lot of work ahead of her and she'll be very much alone. Curiously, the mere presence of an atheist lobbyist has outraged some Christians.

USA Today reports:

Brown likens atheists today to gays in the 1970s: people just coming out of the closet to fight for acceptance. “There’s been so much rhetoric in the past decade about how important religion is to being a good person,” she says, that “it’s been scary” for people to say they don’t believe in God. She vows to “use the A-word and not cringe.” [...]

Brown says she doesn’t expect immediate success on tough issues but, as the only advocate for non--believers in Washington, it’s her job to raise them. “We want to get people thinking about what they do that excludes us,” she says. “The things that ... perpetuate the idea that we are outsiders — that we can’t be patriotic or that we can’t be moral or ethical — when in reality our community is tremendously active in making the world a better place to live.”

Humanist Network News reports on some of the negative reactions she’s received:

Not all audiences were pleased to hear of a non-believer influencing Congressional lawmakers. E-mail sentiments waxed darker for a few hours following an appearance by Brown on the Fox network.

“You madam are an idiot!!” sputtered a self-proclaimed retired Marine and member of the Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW). He added that if Brown is elected “idiot of the month” at his post’s Sept. 30 meeting, her photograph will be embossed on a strainer to be installed in the urinals in the VFW restroom.

Yes, that sounds like a good way for veterans to express their patriotism and show the rest of America what sorts of freedoms they went abroad to fight for: act like narrow-minded bigots and attack anyone with the temerity to offer a dissenting or critical view on popular beliefs. Really, I’d expect that kind of attitude from 5-year-olds. I think I’d be happier with my freedom if it weren’t being “defended” by self-appointed bigots like this guy.

Fortunately, most of the responses have been from atheists and have been positive, but I would be surprised if the hate mail didn’t continue to roll in for a while.

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