Good news and bad news on the atheist ad front

LET’S get the bad news out the way first, with a collective raspberry blown in the direction of APN Outdoor, the company responsible for public transport advertising in major Australian cities .

According to this report, these craven idiots have just rejected a completely inoffensive bus ad proposed by the Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc without giving a reason for the ban.

The slogan proposed by the AFA was:

Atheism – Celebrate reason.

APN Outdoors also rejected various other similar slogans.

AFA President David Nicholls said:

I am flabbergasted. This is extremely disappointing and a severe blow to freedom of expression in Australia. We are witnessing the result of seemingly paranoid executives interfering with pertinent social comment. This action has thwarted the right to state peacefully and openly a legitimate and timely message without violence.

Australia is going to look provincial and narrow in outlook to the rest of the world because of this decision. The planet is moving to a more enlightened era but apparently, public transport advertising agents in Australia have missed the bus.

Another raspberry now at the city of Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County, California, which allegedly ordered the removal of a billboard paid for by the national Freedom From Religion Foundation, and bearing the slogan Imagine No Religion.

The Foundation had contracted for a two-month run for the sign beginning in mid-November. The board, according to FFRF, had been up for less than a week when it was removed, then destroyed, at the apparent instigation of Linda Daniels, Rancho Cucamonga Development Director.

But according to this report, Daniels denies that the city ordered the sign’s removal, saying that the General Outdoor sign company had removed it after the city had received around 90 complaints from local citizens.

The FFRF is not taking this lying down. This week it announced that it was filing a lawsuit in the federal court against the City of Rancho Cucamonga.

Said the Foundation:

The Defendants’ actions conveyed a message that religion is favored, preferred, and promoted by the City of Rancho Cucamonga and its officials, despite subsequent attempts to cover up the Defendants’ involvement in sending an objectively understood message disapproving FFRF’s billboard.

It added:

The Defendants’ actions, including by interfering with and contributing to cause FFRF’s message to be removed from the public realm, were undertaken precisely because of the content of FFRF’s message, including the Defendants’ perception that FFRF was expressing an idea that some members of society found offensive or disagreeable.

The Defendants’ actions, including by interfering with and contributing to cause FFRF’s message to be silenced, were taken under color of law, and in violation of FFRF’s Free Speech rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Foundation charged that the city’s actions were:

Undertaken in wilful, wanton and intentional disregard of FFRF’s rights.

The good news is that the $40,000 bus campaign launched by the American Humanist Association with the slogan Why believe in a God? Be Good for Goodness Sake is on a roll – and has already got up the nose of those morons at the American Family Association, who recently began flogging blazing crosses on the internet.

The ghastly Tim Wildmon, President of the AFA, railed:

It’s a stupid ad. How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.

And Mathew Staver, of the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal group, blathered:

It’s the ultimate grinch to say there is no God at a time when millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Christ. Certainly, they have the right to believe what they want but this is insulting.