The other night I had the opportunity to meet personally with the director of the United Coalition of Reason, Fred Edwords. The Coalition has been at the forefront of taking the message of freethought all over the US. By posting freethinking messages on billboards and communicating our views to the press, it has done a fantastic job of informing the public about the religiously unaffiliated-the fastest growing, yet most maligned, minority.
I brought up with Edwords the recent incident of vandalism of an FFRF billboard in Pennsylvania, apparently by a person who freely admits, and has no qualms about, his crime. Of course, this was not an isolated incident: Edwords mentioned two cases of the Coaltion’s billboards being vandalized in just two weeks, in Virginia and California.
While such instances are clearly an indication of the double standards we face, Edwords has a more utilitarian perspective. He mentioned that the amount of press coverage we get typically rises sharply after such crimes. Since the goal of the campaign is to reach out to like-minded people and inform them that there is a community for them out there, incidents of vandalism may in fact benefit us.
This by no means mitigates or condones the crime of vandalism. There is also the issue of some of our billboards not going up in the first place, due to threats of violence and vandalism. Nonetheless, it does highlight the fact that the good people of faith my be doing us a favor by giving us publicity.
God indeed works in mysterious ways.
Image credit: www.unitedcor.org
