Greta is one of my favourite bloggers out there. She writes A LOT and it's mostly around atheism and sexuality issues. These are some snips from a recent piece by her entitled:
What Can the Atheist Movement Learn from the Gay Movement?The atheist movement is already modeling ourselves in many ways on the LGBT movement. And we should. The parallels between the two movements are sometimes eerie. And since the LGBT movement is roughly 35 years ahead of the atheist movement -- I think the atheist movement right now is about where the LGBT movement was in the early '70s right after the Stonewall riots -- we have a unique chance to learn from that movement... both from its successes and its failures.
Probably the single most important thing atheists can learn from the LGBT movement is to encourage visibility and coming out -- and to work harder on making the atheist movement a safer place to come out into.
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In the post-Stonewall days of the LGBT movement, there was a massive blossoming of LGBT community centers, bookstores, coffeehouses, political groups, bars, bowling leagues, etc. Coming out as queer often meant leaving behind your friends and family -- so queers formed our own social support networks, to take the place of the ones that rejected us.
The atheist movement hasn't been as strong about this. Online we have -- we've done an excellent job of providing online communities for atheists. But we haven't done as good a job at providing in- the- flesh support networks to replace the churches/ synagogues/ mosques/ covens/ etc., and the sense of belonging and common purpose they provide.
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We need to remember that when we encourage people to re-think religion and consider atheism, we're asking a lot. We're not just asking people to reshape the entire philosophical foundation of their lives and to let go of a major source of comfort they've relied on for years. We're asking them, in many cases, to alienate their friends, family, community. I'd like to see us do a better job of providing something to replace it with.
Secular student alliance I will say, since this is a conference for the Secular Student Alliance, that the college and university groups have, to a great extent, been an exception to this rule. The student groups have been providing a lot of in- the- flesh support and community for fledgling atheists.
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There's another lesson that I think atheists can learn from the LGBT movement; one that the LGBT movement took a little while to learn. And that's to let firebrands be firebrands, and to let diplomats be diplomats. We need to recognize that not all activists pursue activism in the same say; we need to recognize that using both more confrontational and more diplomatic approaches makes us a stronger movement, and that both these approaches used together, synergistically, are more powerful than either approach alone.
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Some folks are better able to hear a quiet, sympathetic voice. Others are better able to hear a passionate cry for justice. And the "good cop/ bad cop" dynamic can be very effective. Again, in the queer movement of the '80s and '90s, the street activists got attention, got on the news, raised general visibility and awareness. The polite negotiators could then raise a more polite, nuanced form of hell, knowing that the people they were working with had at least a baseline awareness of our issues. And when the street activists presented more hard-line demands, that made the polite negotiators seem more reasonable in comparison. The line between an extremist position and a moderate one kept getting moved in our direction. We see this working today: the same-sex marriage debate has made supporting civil unions seem like the moderate position, even the conservative one -- which wasn't true ten years ago.
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On any given issue, it's sometimes worth debating whether diplomacy or confrontation (or a combination) will be a more effective tactic in that particular case. But I'd like to us stop treating these debates as if they were larger questions of morality or character that have to be resolved in one direction or the other once and for all. We do what we're inspired to do, and what we're good at. Some of us are good at passionate, confrontational idealism; some of us are good at sympathy with our opponents. (And some of us are good at a mix of these approaches.) The diplomatic atheists need to stop trying to shut up the firebrands, stop accusing them of alienating people. And the firebrand atheists need to stop accusing the diplomats of being wusses. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy.
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There's a third, very important lesson that the godless movement can learn from the LGBT movement. And that's to not waste our time squabbling about language. We need to let godless people use whatever language they want to define themselves.
There is, again, an eerie parallel between the non-theist movement and the LGBT movement. It's a similarity between two relationships: the relationship between homosexuals and bisexuals on the one hand, and the relationship between atheists and agnostics on the other.
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...in the same way that gays and lesbians have (for the most part) learned to quit telling bisexuals that they're "really" gay or lesbian and are just afraid to admit it, I think atheists need to quit telling agnostics that they're "really" atheist and are just afraid to admit it. (By the same token, just like bisexuals have to quit saying "Everyone's basically bisexual," agnostics have to shut up about how most atheists are really agnostic, how, quote, "true" atheism is a belief system as much as religion, and how agnosticism is more consistent and honorable.) Atheists and agnostics are natural allies -- along with humanists, skeptics, materialists, naturalists, freethinkers, brights, etc. Much like gays and lesbians and bisexuals and transgendered people are all natural allies. We shouldn't waste our time and energy squabbling because you say tomayto and I say tomahto.
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(Next) This is a lesson that atheists can learn, not from the successes of the LGBT movement, but from one of our biggest failures -- a failure that has come back to bite us in the ass time and again.
Embrace-diversity Atheists need to work -- now -- on making our movement more diverse, and making it more welcoming and inclusive of women and people of color.
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The early LGBT movement was very much dominated by gay white men. The public representatives of the movement were mostly gay white men; most organizations were led by gay white men. And the gay white male leaders had some seriously bad race and gender stuff: treating gay men of color as fetishistic Others, objects of sexual desire rather than members of the community... and treating lesbians as alien Others, inscrutable and trivial.
And we're paying for it today. Relations between lesbians and gay men, between white queers and queers of color, are often strained at best. Conversations in our movement about race and gender take place in a decades-old minefield of rancor and bitterness, where nothing anybody says is right. And we still, after decades, have a strong tendency to put gay white men front and center as the most visible, iconic representatives of our community.
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The atheist movement is currently largely dominated by white men... especially in positions of visibility and leadership. And many atheists resist seeing this as a problem that we need to take action on. They're not overtly racist or sexist, they're not saying, "We don't want women or people of color in our movement"... but they don't see this as their responsibility, and they don't see it as particularly important.
I could give an entire talk on why this is important. I could give an entire talk on how racism and sexism aren't always conscious, how we perpetuate them without even thinking about them, and why we therefore need to pay conscious attention to countering them. I could give an entire talk on how people tend to focus on issues that personally affect them... so an atheist movement dominated by white men will focus on issues that largely affect white men -- at the expense of issues that largely concern women and people of color. I could talk about self-fulfilling prophecies: how even if the predominant whiteness and maleness of the atheist movement were purely accidental, this pattern would still get perpetuated and ingrained... because women and people of color feel less welcome in a movement that's largely white and male -- and the less welcome they/ we feel, the longer the movement goes on being largely white and male.
But I'm running out of time, so I mainly want to say this: Look at every other movement for social change in recent history. Every single one that I know about has been bitten on the ass by this issue. Every one now wishes they'd taken action on it in the early days, before bad habits and self-fulfilling prophecies got set in a deep groove that's hard to break out of. And that includes the LGBT movement.
There are lots of good reasons for atheists to work on this. There are idealistic reasons: because religion hurts women and people of color as much as it hurts white men; because female atheists, and atheists of color, matter just as much as white male atheists, etc. And there are practical reasons -- it'll make our movement stronger, larger, better at reaching more people.
YEAH, she writes loooong posts. But they're good, and very insightful most of the times, I highly recommend her blog:
http://gretachristina.typepad.comI think she makes some excellent points that I've selected to post here. As ex-muslims, we are part of the "atheist movement" that's currently taking place on various levels, but I think we could learn from some of this, e.g. about how to deal with the differences between us and e.g the FFI/Wafa Sultan types. To create more "meatworld" spaces for atheists coming from Muslim backgrounds, etc.
Topic: Greta Christina: What Can the Atheist Movement Learn from the Gay Movement?