Moving Our Community Forward

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, please contact:

Kim Rippere, Secular Woman President: 404.669.6727 E-mail

Elsa Roberts, Secular Woman Vice President: 906.281.0384 E-mail

After CEO Ron Lindsay’s remarks at Women In Secularism II, Secular Woman released an open letter detailing our objections to much of Dr. Lindsay’s speech, which we also communicated to the board of CFI. We were not alone; many of our membership and readership, as well as several prominent feminist and atheist leaders and writers echoed our sentiments. After several weeks of waiting, the CFI board of directors issued a non-committal response which we were far from satisfied with as it failed to address the concerns detailed by so many. Our response was to wait and see if further action resulted, as we saw how our entire community was fracturing and didn’t want it to become further divided.

So, we were pleased when we saw that Dr. Lindsay had chosen to issue his own apology for his remarks during his opening speech at Women in Secularism II. Apologies, in particular, public apologies are both imperfect and a challenging thing to engage in, but they are vital to healing hurt communities. Dr. Lindsay chose to be authentic in his apology, showing an understanding of the hurt caused and a willingness to listen to us and others who wrote to him with our concerns. We thank Dr. Lindsay for beginning to address our concerns and are hopeful of continued dialogue and understanding.

To further those objectives, we have some practical suggestions for moving forward as individuals and a community. We suggest that Dr. Lindsay and CFI continue to engage social justice on multiple levels, in particular focusing on core issues such as the concepts of privilege and intersectionality in a workshop or seminar; announce and commit to a WIS 3, a conference that women and feminists in the secular community highly value; and join Secular Woman in creating a joint task force focused on inclusion in the secular community.

We’re eager to see CFI grow into a leader in areas around intersectionality and inclusion within our community; developing the Women in Secularism conference was an exciting first step but there is so much more work to be done and so much yet to learn. This is an exciting and momentous time for our movement and CFI, so let’s build on the successes we are just now starting to make as a secular community and as feminists and social justice advocates within our movement.

Show others the path, help them take the first step, and help draw our online and in-real-life community together.

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Secular Woman is an educational non-profit organization whose mission is to amplify the voice, presence, and influence of non-religious women. For more information about Secular Woman visit: www.SecularWoman.org.