Eastern Iowa Atheists member Tyler Hupp of Independence, Iowa, shares details on a project that he's undertaken to lobby local city governments to amend their Equal Opportunity Ordinances, where he got the inspiration for the idea and why it's important to him for cities to make this change.
On Tuesday, May 2nd, I sent an email to the Human Rights offices of nine eastern Iowa cities proposing an amendment to their Equal Opportunity Ordinances to include atheists as a protected class of citizens.
It was an easy task and it didn’t take a lot of effort. I took time out of my day to attempt to change things in eastern Iowa and, honestly, if more people realized that something as small as this could make a major impact, then more people would do it.
The more difficult part will be convincing the commissions of each city to adopt and pass the amendment. Protecting and preserving the rights of atheists, I imagine, is not at the forefront of any city’s agenda but that is the exact reason why proposing an amendment such as this is so important. It is a known fact that the number of individuals claiming to be religious in the US is declining and the individuals in our city governments who are religious (it isn’t hard to guess which religion) are working harder than ever to prevent religious authority from becoming a past sentiment. The Eastern Iowa Atheists, led by Justin Scott, have been challenging the authority of city governments this past year through the issuances of The Day of Reason to counter the Day of Prayer and by offering secular invocations where theist invocations were given previously. Proposing that atheism be recognized and specifically protected under city ordinances will let our government know that our community is growing and that any denial of equality on the account of our nonbelief will not be tolerated.
The big inspiration for the mass emails came from our neighbors to the east. On May 9th, 2015, the city of Madison, WI passed an amendment to their existing Equal Opportunity Ordinance specifically protecting atheists against any form of discrimination or denial of equality. Of course there was plenty of negativity surrounding the amendment and this mainly is due to the fact that religion was already in the ordinance. But, some may argue that since atheism is not a religion it would not be protected which is why the bill was passed. In an interview with Madison’s WISC TV, the bill’s primary sponsor Anita Weier explained that, “..it is only fair that if we protect religion, in all its varieties, we should also protect non-religion from discrimination. It's only fair.” Right on Anita!
This is only the first part of this journey and lucky for us atheists, we have statistics on our side! The Pew Research Center publishes an interesting study where they ask people which version of the Christian fairy tale they believe in. The stuff we care about though is the number of people who claim they are atheists. So far Iowa has around 3 million people living within its borders and Pew reported that 4% of the residents here said they were atheists (that is roughly 120,000 people for those of you that like math. Now imagine if we were able to gather all of those atheists in one big atheist music festival! Now that would be fun!
What this really means though, is that atheists are underrepresented in city governments and if one city in Iowa amended their civil rights ordinance to specifically protect atheists, the action would hopefully convince more cities to implement the same change. It’s not often that the term “slippery slope” is used in a positive tone, but I really hope that one city implementing this change would lead to all of the larger cities in Iowa doing the same. There’s still a lot more work to be done though. In order for atheism to be accepted and protected, just as every other religion, it needs to be front and center in every news source in even the smallest towns in Iowa to normalize the word and the nonbelief.
When an earthquake happens in the middle of the ocean it doesn’t do much damage. The real impact, though, comes from the shock wave that eventually forms a giant wall of water called a Tsunami. The activism and continuing efforts by the Eastern Iowa Atheists to normalize atheism have been making “earthquakes” all over eastern Iowa lately and what the unassuming citizen doesn’t know yet is that the tide of Christian control is slowly receding and a giant atheist Tsunami is about to hit every part of this state!
Comments
Post a Comment