Once again, here were people, along with Blacks and Hispanics, whose tax money, and bodily sacrifice in battle were acceptable to a country which otherwise wanted them to remain silent and invisible, yet which ambivalently delighted in opening those closet doors for the purpose of humiliating and often prosecuting those within. Some bridle at the word atheist. The American Humanist Association members are constantly discussing and disputing what to call themselves. So now there are Religious Humanists, Secular Humanists, and Jewish Humanists, which have formed their own groups which may or may not still be affiliated with the larger American Humanist Association. But whatever they choose to call themselves, for the sake of brevity they will be referred to herein as atheists or freethinkers, freethinker being a convenient umbrella term for nonbelievers.
Freethinkers come in assorted shapes, colors and sizes.
They are straight, gay or bisexual, and unless they point their own finger at themselves, they are pretty hard to detect. The majority of nonbelievers in such a situation would quell their nausea, grit their teeth and play out the charade. They might lose friends, hurt or alienate parents, put their children at risk for ridicule or even physical harm by their peers, lose jobs, lose standing in the community, have their property vandalized or receive death threats. All of these are possibilities, and some atheists have experienced all of them simply because of their efforts to protect the Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and state. The media, in its perpetual state of adolescence, misses this golden opportunity to defend the Constitution and inform the reading, viewing, listening public that those who do so are not the enemy.