UPDATE: Discrimination-Gate 2011 “Atheist Activist with an Axe to Grind”

Update: Discrimination-Gate Scandal

By David G. McAfee

 

                Many of you may remember a couple of weeks ago when I told the story of the head of the UCSB Religious Studies Graduate Department who called me an “atheist activist with an axe to grind”- and my subsequent rejection from the graduate program. For those of you who don’t please check out the original article for details. Shortly thereafter, I was overwhelmed with e-mails of support from secular activists, professional lawyers, and those involved with the humanist movement more broadly. I posted an article with instructions for those wishing to participate in our Letter-Writing Campaign- and had some amazing letters sent to the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs. This weekend, we will be organizing a second campaign directing letters to the heads of UCSB and the UC system as a whole voicing support for the separation of church and state in admissions decisions and conversations between professors and students at a secular, public, university.

How You Can Help- Recent Discrimination Grievance

Help Restore Separation of Church and State at UCSB

By David G. McAfee

Recently, I told you all about an incident in which an official at a public university denied my admission to Graduate School because she considered me “an atheist activist with an axe to grind“. My basing her decision not on the merits of my work (she hadn’t read my work), but on my religious preferences (or lack thereof), she violated the Constitutional Law of Separation of Church and State. I have sent this article to various watchdog groups (including FFRF and Americans United for Separation of Church and State) and am awaiting a reply. I have also sent the story to the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs at UCSB in order to file a formal discrimination grievance against Ann Taves and the Religious Studies Department. Many of you have written to me in order to ask what you can do in order to help restore separation of Church and State by protesting the matter through a civil suit or other channels within the UC System. Well, here I’ll outline exactly what you can do to help.

Letter-Writing Campaign

If you wish to contact somebody with the power to rule in my favor in the formal discrimination grievance, please send your letters to the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at UCSB :

ATTN: Dr. Michael D. Young

5203 Cheadle Hall Santa Barbara, CA 93106-2036

You can also reach him by:

Email: michael.young@sa.ucsb.edu

Telephone:  (805) 893-3651

Donations

If you would like to help financially, in order to assist with the lawyer fees that will inevitably arise from a case involving separation of Church and State, we will be accepting small donations sent by USPS only to the following address:

David G. McAfee

PO BOX 153, Goleta, CA  93116

Spread the Word

Finally, if you would like to help the cause by doing nothing more than e-mailing othar posting to Facebook/Twitter, I hope you can forward the original article (https://davidgmcafee.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/an-atheist-activist-with-an-axe-to-grind) to as many people as possible. If you happen to know lawyers, media personalities, or high-profile secularists, then please feel free to share with them as well. The more support we have behind this cause, the more likely we are to actually get something done and fix a broken system.

Finally, I’d like to thank all of you for your support and I hope we can make this a winning fight against religious intolerance and discrimination in our government-funded public universities.

Reasonably Yours,

David G. McAfee

Help The Cause- Letter Writing Campaign