Only “several thousand” people.
In “Atheists Darken D.C.” (Townhall, March 28, 2012), Brent Bozell remarks on last weekend’s Reason Rally,
It’s interesting that our secular, religion-mocking media mostly skipped over this rally as one steps around a ranting homeless person. The networks were missing, as were the Associated Press, The New York Times and others. Perhaps they didn’t think an atheist protest this explicit was worth getting behind. Their kind of secular, religion-mocking rally was 2010’s Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”
The pre-rally publicity was too ridiculous to believe. At National Public Radio — yes, they are interested — Barbara Bradley Hagerty explained the rally was “not to tweak the faithful. It’s to encourage closeted atheists to take heart.” How NPR-thoughtful. Atheist blogger Hemant Mehta complained, “Every time you hear the word atheist in the media, you know, there’s always an adjective before it. It’s always angry atheist, militant atheist, staunch atheist. It’s never happy, smiling atheist.” There are also dumb atheists who don’t know “happy” is also an adjective.
Could it be that organized atheism is as fatuous boring as a lot of organized religion? Shocka.
On Saturday morning, as the rain began to pour on the atheists, NPR weekend anchor Scott Simon added more blather from his DC studio: “Rally organizers say they don’t want to mock religion. A lot of nonbelievers I know and hear from are eager for atheists to be seen as more than just scolds who point out absurdities and inconsistencies in religion or the kind of grumps who file lawsuits against shopping-mall Santa Clauses.”
The problem is, they usually are the kind of grumps who file lawsuits against shopping-mall Santa Clauses. Heck, they’re the kind of people who would file lawsuits against the Salvation Army, the very people who take them in if they were ever homeless, ranting. …
Presumably because they haven’t anything better to do.
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