After having his organization’s booth banned from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, American Atheists President David Silverman decided to attend the GOP gathering anyway, handing out pamphlets with the group’s information.
The atheist advocacy group was barred from participating in the conference after Silverman claimed that “the Christian right should be threatened by us” during an interview with CNN in February.
"[T]hat was the line, the fact that I used 'threatened' in a sentence. They just took [it] out and assigned it do [sic] a different thing," Silverman told TPM on Thursday. "We're not threatening any people. We're threatening the Christian right's hold on conservatism. We're attacking the notion that you need to be Christian in order to be conservative. And that's a false notion.”
During Thursday’s conference, Silverman also spoke with Esquire’s Charles Pierce, highlighting some of the issues he viewed as detrimental to the growth of the Republican party:
If conservatives want more votes, they need to solicit the growing portion of the community, not the shrinking portion. You're losing people when you say that creationism should be taught to my kids, taught to other people's children, in the public school. That's mythology. That's not what should be taught ... That's not conservatism. That's theocracy. Conservatism is that government stays out of lives. It means government doesn't go into the doctor's office or into the bedroom. That's big government. And I'm here to say that that's big government, and it should be dumped.
(h/t Talking Points Memo)
Before You Go
