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  • 2015-12-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Angry Atheists Ban the Bible? (en)
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  • On 4 December 2015 the Facebook page American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a Christian advocacy group founded by Pat Robertson, published the above-reproduced image along with the following text: The status update claimed a radical group of atheists had demanded all hotels remove Bibles from their rooms, and references to it in social media asserted that the Bible banners sought to ban the Bible in ALL hotel rooms. The link appended to the update pointed to an ACLJ petition titled Don't Ban the Bible. Defend It, which read (in part): The image asserted simply that angry atheists [were] trying to ban the Bible, while the status update maintained a radical group of atheists is demanding all hotels remove Bibles from their rooms, and the linked petition claimed [the] Freedom from Religion Foundation (a non-profit non-theist advocacy group) is demanding that the Bible ... be banned from university hotel rooms. The petition published on Facebook by the ACLJ specifically referenced university hotel rooms, which in turn suggested that the conflict in question pertained to religious materials and public institutions. On 30 October 2015, the FFRF had published a press release on the matter which stated that: As such, the 4 December 2015 ACLJ image meme was misleading at the time it was issued. The so-called Bible ban involved public universities and the issue of government endorsement of religious texts, not a call to remove all Bibles from all hotel rooms. On 2 December 2015, the ACLJ published an article titled Angry Atheists Demand Hotels Ban the Bible Comparing Scripture to Danger of Smoking which held that: That article referenced a 12 October 2015 article about the issue of hotel rooms and Bibles published on the blog Patheos: To be clear, the 2 December 2015 ACLJ article referenced a think-piece suggesting (not demanding) that hotels offer Bible-free rooms for guests. However, on 7 December 2015 the FFRF issued a press release titled FFRF Requests 'Bible-Free' Hotel Rooms, which read in part: Whether the chain of press releases from ACLJ and FFRF regarding Bibles in hotel rooms (both public university lodging and otherwise) were part of a direct rhetorical escalation or simply coincidental was unclear. Further obfuscating the chain of debate were assertions that the FFRF sought to ban all Bibles from all hotel rooms at any point during the controversy. According to releases from both the FFRF and the ACLJ, the FFRF requested that Bibles be removed from hotel rooms at public universities in or around October 2015, and that request (framed as more broad that it actually was at the time by the ACLJ) was granted. Concurrently, the FFRF asked that commercial hospitality properties consider offering Bible-free hotel rooms to non-theists or non-Christian guests. Whether that request involved removal of Bibles from all rooms (with the books remaining available to guests who asked for them) was unclear, but the specific use of the term Bible-free rooms and the comparison to smoke-free hotel rooms suggested that the request extended to some (but not all) rooms. (en)
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