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I read articles all the time that slam atheists. We are the devil incarnate, the anti-Christ, the source of all that is wrong with the world today.

Politicians go to great lengths to distance themselves from us. In years past, they kissed babies to make themselves likable. Now they quote from the Bible and profess their personal belief in invisible beings in the sky. If a politician doesn’t wear his Christianity on his sleeve, he is accused of being godless, or, equally abhorrent to most in this country, a Muslim.

According to recent polls, a good number of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. Ann Coulter, a writer who is one of the dimmer bulbs on the right-wing star circuit, has gone one step further and declared that he is an atheist. She’s not making that declaration in a complimentary way. Coulter is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that atheists are evil.

“The nonsense about President Obama being a Muslim has got to stop,” she wrote recently on a right-wing website. “I rise to defend him from this absurd accusation by pointing out he is obviously an atheist.”

Of course, as much as I’d like to believe it’s true, there is absolutely no evidence that Obama is an atheist. That doesn’t stop Coulter from going on for far too many column inches with her unsubstantiated claim. For anyone with an ounce of brains, it becomes readily apparent that Coulter has nothing to go on except her drive to get attention.

Is “atheist” Coulter’s new “faggot?” A few years ago, she was using “faggot” to describe people she didn’t like. Now I guess she’ll start using “atheist” in the same way. Not that she’s let up on the homophobia. In the course of trying to “prove” Obama’s atheism, she describes someone (I won’t mention names) as the president’s “butt-boy.” As if being the passive partner in anal sex is bad.

I’m sick of it.

Both as an atheist, and a faggot. “Atheist” is not a pejorative. It’s not an insult or a put-down.

“Atheist” is a compliment. It is indicative of a person’s intelligence that he or she has worked through the conditioning we’re all subjected to every day, the brainwashing that compels us to believe, without a single shred of evidence, that there’s a heavenly host of characters in the sky (gods, virgins, angels, our dead relatives, and who knows who else) guiding human events on Earth. That

they can be implored to act on our behalf and help us get jobs, win the lottery, marry someone we have the hots for, etc.

I don’t expect that Christians such as Coulter will change their attitude about atheists any time soon. Ann is unlikely to embrace multiculturalism and give a big hug to the nearest atheist.

But I want Coulter to know that atheists are not hiding in closets anymore, we’re not afraid to say who we are. And we’re not alone: more Americans than ever before (about 18% or 40 million) say that they do not believe in any religion.

That’s the making of a powerful minority.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is co-editor of Avanti Popolo: Italians Sailing Beyond Columbus, and editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, which was nominated for both an American Library Association and a Lambda Literary award. His website is www.avicollimecca.com.

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