Eva sent me this excerpt from an interview with Ron Reagan Jr. from the NY Times Magazine:

Now that the country is awash in Reagan nostalgia, some observers are predicting that you will enter politics. Would you like to be president of the United States?

I would be unelectable. I'm an atheist. As we all know, that is something people won't accept.

Earlier this week, my wife also caught his interview with Larry King, where he said the same thing.

KING: Do you ever think of running for office?

REAGAN: No...

KING: You've got a pretty good name going in.

REAGAN: It seems to work for some people.

KING: Wouldn't hurt you.

REAGAN: No, I'm not really cut out to be a politician. You know that I sometimes don't know when to shut up. That could be a drawback. I'm an atheist. So there you go right there. I can't be elected to anything because polls all say that people won't elect an atheist.

Depressing, isn't it? I think it's true that an atheist couldn't get elected president, but I think it misses the point. Lots of people couldn't possibly get elected—I recall that in high school I had one particularly subversive social studies teacher who turned the fable that "anyone could be president in this country!" around. He had an exercise where he'd go through the classroom and tell everyone why they'd never get elected (or at least, what kinds of things they'd have to give up in order to be electable; this was the 1970s, and really, just the haircuts most people had were enough to disqualify them). The funny thing is that I was the one person in all of his classes that he thought at least lacked any obvious flaws.

(That sorta tells you what I was like in high school, doesn't it? Inoffensive, conservatively dressed and coifed, with a clean record. And white and male. I didn't dash my fleeting moment of potential political glory by mentioning that I had one attribute that utterly destroyed my chances: even then I was an atheist.)

I honestly can't say that I feel particularly put upon because my lack of religion disqualifies me for virtually every political office in the country—I couldn't run for city council in my teeny tiny home town without hiding my beliefs, but 99% of all people couldn't get elected to the job, either.

What is odd is that atheism is one of several characteristics many people will be openly prejudiced against. They'll even be proud of so despising atheists that they'd never vote for them. They are perfectly willing to publicly declare that they wouldn't vote for someone because they are an atheist, in the same sense that they would feel no shame at refusing to elect a convicted embezzler to be city treasurer. I think a lot of these same people would discriminate against blacks running for office, for instance, but at least the majority now know enough to feel guilty about it and wouldn't admit that bigotry was behind their decision (at least, not in Minnesota. I can think of a few places where being a segregationist is considered a mark of honor.)

A presidential candidate who said, "No, I don't know that African-Americans should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots" would find himself instantly pilloried and unelectable...a David Duke who would be popular on the hateful fringe, but a pariah in the mainstream. One can say, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots", and the press hardly notices. The only other group that comes close to being as acceptable a target of prejudice are homosexuals, I suspect.

Oh, well. At least we atheists get an open dismissal, rather than the sneaky, cowardly hatred that gets you beat up in dark alleys.