Ed Brayton has a post over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars today that relates how the closet is often enforced on atheists too…

Our Mere Existence is Offensive

It has been fascinating watching the response, city by city, where the advertisement that says "Not religious? You’re not alone" has gone up. We’ve seen bus drivers refuse to drive buses with that ad on them (and get fired for it). In Cincinnati, death threats forced the removal of a billboard with that message.

And now in Nashville, the local yokels are up in arms about an identical billboard. And offering the usual brilliant reasoning to support their position:

"It just absolutely wrong place, wrong town, wrong timing," said Green Hills resident Donnie Cude.

Something about the phrase "Not Religious, You’re not alone", doesn’t sit well with Cude.

"It’s a slap in the face to the Nashvillians and the people who have a strong foundation and do so much good for this town," said Cude.

It has become quite clear that the mere existence of people who don’t accept their religious views is considered a terrible offense to the most reason-impaired of the righteous. I just can’t imagine why anyone else should really care what offends them.

Brayton, let it be said, is also a principled advocate for gay equality pretty regularly on his blog.  So it’s a safe bet he knows perfectly well how a story like this would resonate with his gay readers.  But I have to say that my hunch is that atheists probably get it worse nowadays. 

I can think of a lot of cities where those bus ads would…yeah…draw some notice, but not a whole lot of bellyaching had they read "Gay?  You’re Not Alone."

I remember a passage from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap where one gay character tells another ruefully about the unspoken rule in Hollywood, that there are two things you can’t be and keep working in this town and one of them is a communist.  But back in the day communism and atheism were tightly joined together in the political rhetoric of the cold war, and more often then not what you got was the sense that the problem with Communism wasn’t it’s totalitarian nature but that it was godless.  "Godless communism" was what they called it.  Now it’s just godlessness.  Probably in the hierarchy of evilness, Atheists are worse then homosexuals…homosexuals being merely the interior decorators of Satan’s evil one world empire, atheists being its sinister architects. 

Penn Jillette wrote a simple, lovely piece about being an atheist for an NPR series titled, This I Believe.  It reads in part…

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

The problem, as a lot of gay folk already know painfully well is that the more you come out of the closet, the more people can see you for the human being that you are, the more the bigots will hate you for the human being that you are.