Libby Dole Is A Hateful Bigot

It's just a little more than a day before the 2008 Presidential election. Here in North Carolina, the Kay Hagan-Elizabeth Dole race for Dole's senate seat has been continuously ugly, but only recently has Libby Dole played a card that has enraged my friends in the atheist blogosphere: she has accused her opponent of (gasp!) consorting with atheists.

I won't even get into Hagan's reply, which was almost as infuriating. But Dole's smear wasn't really against Kay Hagan; rather, it was against atheist Americans. Her ad strongly implied that the godless community is somehow un-American; that only believers in God are patriotic citizens of the United States, and that the rest of us - perhaps 15% of the population, making us the second- or third-largest "faith" group in the country - are shady, immoral betrayers of all that is good and decent and (gulp!) Christian.

It's hard enough being an atheist in the South. I have often commented on the fact that I have driven for miles without spotting a single book store, but can easily count three dozen churches, lined up one after the other like God's little white-shingled dominoes. The school I used to teach at was filled with people who had no problem with teachers conducting fund-raising for their Christian churches, or with the principal leading the faculty in prayer before staff lunches. My status there already threatened by a personality conflict I had with the principal, I couldn't voice my opinion, for fear of further tipping the balance against me (as it turned out, I may as well have opened my mouth and told them exactly what I thought of their damned un-Constitutional mixing of private faith with public money).

But this is too much. Dole has taken out the Jesse Helms playbook and tarred her opponent with one of the last acceptable appeals to fear-mongering in relation to an entire social group. As a nation, we have thankfully marched forward in how we deal with minority populations - outright bigotry against most ethnic groups has been mostly eliminated, and we are making progress in how we address our gay, lesbian, and transgendered brothers and sisters. But I will feel a hell of a lot more comfortable about our acceptance of minorities when my group - the community of the godless - is no longer characterized as the root of all immorality and treason in America.