New York Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks to reporters before taking part in the Gay Pride Parade in New York June 26, 2011. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi (JESSICA RINALDI - REUTERS)

Atheists and agnostics have a lot to learn from gays about the essential role of coming out in any long-term battle for personal respect and political recognition in American society. When New York’s state Senate passed a historic bill legalizing gay marriage last weekend, I happened to be attending a reunion of my eighth-grade class at St. Thomas Aquinas School in East Lansing, MI. A striking fact about this group of men and women, raised on the Catholic and American verities of the 1950s, was that many of my classmates, influenced by gay relatives and friends, long ago discarded the anti-homosexual biases with which we were all raised. Atheism, however, is still—if not a dirty word—an uneasy secret. Several of my classmates told me quietly that they would be happy to be interviewed about their nonreligious beliefs but wanted to remain anonymous.

What gays learned, painfully, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s is that not only self-respect but respect from others depends on owning up to (and owning) who you are and what you believe. Atheists in many walks of life have yet to learn that lesson. There is only one self-acknowledged atheist in Congress, Democratic Rep. Pete Stark of California.

There are undoubtedly many other politicians who hide their beliefs behind nominal church membership because they fear that owning up to atheism would end their political careers. And they might be right. But there is absolutely no way to make a positive case for secular values by pretending to be religious when you aren’t.

Several months ago, a spokesman for a respected secular organization told me about a member of the House who was uncertain about how to explain a seemingly antireligious vote in his heavily religious district. He was uncertain because he belonged to a church and was a closeted atheist. It seems to me that the politician’s real problem is not explaining his vote but lying by omission and commission about his core beliefs.

Just as many Americans a generation ago held homophobic views without realizing that somone they loved and admired was gay, so too do many Americans today hold negative stereotypes about “immoral” atheists without knowing that someone they care about is in fact an atheist.

In reading the explanations of New York legislators who voted against same-sex marriage two years ago and changed their minds this time, I was most impressed by the importance of personal relationships with gay relatives and friends. New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo lives with a woman who has a gay brother, and Cuomo used the full power of his office to convince wavering legislators to vote for the bill.

Sen. Carl Kruger, a Democrat from Brooklyn who voted no two years ago and yes this time around, shares his life with a woman who has a beloved gay nephew. “I don’t need this,” Kruger told the state senate’s Democratic majority leader. “It has gotten personal now.” The Democratic leader replied, “When everything else is gone, “all you have left is family.”
People lining the parade route hold signs thanking New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for the legalization of gay marriage during the Gay Pride Parade in New York June 26, 2011. (JESSICA RINALDI - REUTERS)

I do not agree with those who see anti-atheist sentiment as a civil rights issue comparable to discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or sexual orientation. All you have to do is shut up about your atheism and you can go about the business of being a legislator, a corporate executive, or an exterminator (mine happens to be an agnostic) without anyone telling you that you’re too immoral to pass laws, run a business, or clear mice out of an apartment. The price to be paid for this silence, however, is that the haters of secularism, atheism and freethought are free to go on demonizing atheists as people who have no “morals” because they do not believe in any god.

It’s much harder to do that if you know that your child, the representative you have sent back to Congress for years, or the farmer who sells you tomatoes are also atheists. And it was much easier to think of homosexuals as “the other” when gay men always took care to bring a female date to family functions and lesbians referred to their long-time partners as “roommates.”

I am well aware that it is easy for a writer who lives in New York City to take this stand. Although I have certainly lost potential readers who dismiss everything I have to say because I am an atheist, I have gained others who are more receptive to my writing because of my secular beliefs. It is easier for someone like me to come out as an atheist than it would be, say, for a school principal in the Bible Belt. But when it comes to public opinion, there is no substitute for the knowledge that the ranks of atheists include people in your own community and people who share something of your background.

One woman at my reunion told me that she had always thought of atheists as harsh and “judgmental” about people of faith and that she was surprised to hear me say that many of my best teachers (leaving religion instruction aside) had been nuns. The point is that by expressing respect for those nuns as educators in nonreligious academic areas, I challenged one of her stereotypes about atheists. That could not have happened if I were fudging my own beliefs and pretending to be someone who believed in Catholicism or any form of religion. As long as a majority of Americans see atheists as people with whom they could not possibly have anything in common, secularists will never wield political influence in proportion to their actual numbers.

It is imperative that politicians, educators, business leaders and others in a position to influence public opinion, both in their own communities and nationally, acknowledge their real beliefs if they are atheists or agnostics. And if that means that some atheists will lose elections or face hostile religious believers in their offices and community organizations, there is always an initial risk in standing up for one’s convictions On a personal level, neither well-known writers nor anonymous bloggers have anything like the influence of a brother, a sister, a friend or a neighbor who also happens to be an atheist. It is impossible to speak with moral force in a muffled voice from the closet. Come out, come out, wherever you are.