Sunday, April 18, 2010
A million New Yorkers are good without religious advertisements. Are You?
After a semester long of discussion about the first amendment and the various situations in which its been invoked to decide landmark cases, I think it’s interesting to take a look back at an article from a few months ago that many of us may at the time would have brushed off without thinking about the possible implications. Back in October a group of eight various atheist organizations purchased a month long campaign that will place their posters through a dozen different subway stations in Manhattan, in an attempt to foster their message: “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?” Apparently the reason for choosing Manhattan as the location for this campaign is due to the city’s extremely busy nature, and wide spread usage of public transportation. The United Coalition of Reason, a national organization that advocates atheist ideas, is among one of the groups involved in this new campaign to buy ad space from the Metro Transit Authority. While on the surface this may seem harmless, and fully in line with advertising guidelines and constitutional legality, does this make anybody besides me a little uneasy?
There are numerous contexts to argue from as to why implementing these ads is such a problem, but outside of a legal standpoint mainly two. To begin with, why is the MTA, an organization run and funded by New York State with tax payer dollars, promoting a religious campaign? While atheism isn’t exactly a religion, it’s actually quite the opposite, the same logic would apply to any religious billboard, as we know from class religion and non religion must be treated equally, and as such the MTA endorses both similarly in their advertising guidelines. I think while not blatant; the state of New York is in fact endorsing religion, at least on some level. If the board read “A million New Yorkers are good with Jesus. Are you?” I can’t help but feel that people would undoubtedly have a problem with this. In fact many of the atheist groups hope that the billboards “encourage talking and thinking about religion and morality,” according to the article. If this is the purpose of the advertisement, then why is the MTA, which is funded by the government, engaging in this kind of religious encouragement. If you weren’t from the United States and were traveling via subway, as many tourists in fact do, and saw a large billboard sponsoring religion, it would be dubious at best to say this wouldn’t generate confusion about the American legal system.
It also happens that just a few years ago an advertisement promoting Islam was being displayed on subway cars, and was being partially funded by an imam of a Brooklyn mosque who served as a character witness for the man convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While I am not saying of course that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Islamic advertisements are funded by terrorists, it must be realized that there is some clear religiously guided message being provided from these billboards. At that time, due to the nature of its funding, this Islamic related billboard was under heavy debate, while currently these new, seemingly religiously content lacking atheist billboards, do not appear to be under particular scrutiny. Whether or not one buys the tax payer dollars argument, we have already looked at cases like Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, just to name one from class, where limited public forum has come into play, and quite frankly what I think I am getting at is, if these subway cars are government affiliated vehicles I believe there exists some right, to not be subjected to billboards displaying religious content while I commute to work in the morning.
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