Hemant Mehta pointed me to an article from The Dallas Morning News, “Dallas-area atheists discuss their outlook, relationships.”  It discusses the lives of atheists in the area, their growing socialization with each other, and socialization with their fellow citizens who are religious.  There is a lot that is interesting in the article, but I will focus on the example of discrimination – this is Secular Discrimination Report after all.

From the article:

Clark Vinson, a Baptist-turned-atheist who grew up in Irving, said he believes he has been discriminated against in the Bible Belt because of his lack of religion.

“I was on the verge of sealing a contract for $105,000 a year for a school district in the area for counseling services,” said Vinson, who was a therapist at the time. “I lost the contract suddenly.”

He said a friend who worked for the district told him a school official was disturbed after seeing a Darwin fish on his car.

This type of discrimination is exactly what atheists and others who lack religion or religious supernatural belief deal with throughout the United States, from the East to the West to the North to the South.  The dominance of religion and expectation that everyone at least believes in some deity leads to some level of innate distrust of the nonreligious in even the most liberal of areas. We don’t always see examples such as this because it is avoided by atheists hiding or at the least not being open about our lack of faith.  If not, discrimination such as this would happen much too often.  If we look at history, as the nonreligious civil right movement is growing and there are more open atheists, we are already and will undoubtedly see more of this in the future.
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