This just in from Jose Frenando Lopez of the Huffington Post:
According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, of the Pew Research Center, the political composition of the US Congress is a clear reflection of the country’s religious composition in all but one case: those that do not believe or are not afiliated to any religion. In the current congress (number 112), the protestant faith has 56.8% of the seating, while their national standing in the country is 51.3%. The same is true with Catholics: their participation in congress is 29.2%, while their national standing is 23.9%. Even Romney’s mormons are overrepresented in Congress: 2.8% while they account for the 1.7% of religious followers in the country.
Those not afiliated to any religion — a group that includes atheists and agnostics, as well as profoundly religious people that have no creed afiliation — represent, according to the surveys, 16.1% of the population of the United States. Their participation in the US Congress, where laws for 300 million americans are drafted, reaches the equivalent of 0%. Only one of the 541 members of Congress — including the special territories and the Washington D.C. representatives — has openly declared his atheism: Pete Stark, a Democratic representative for California.
Lopez comments on the efforts of Richard Dawkins, Elizabeth Cornwell, and Sean Faircloth and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science mission ”to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.”
Sean Faircloth is the executive director of the Secular Coalition for America. Yesterday, I mentioned Amanda Knief would also lobbies for the SCA. I have heard Sean speak and he says that perhaps the single most important thing you can do to help is simply to subscribe to the SCA’s action alerts. Well, that is easy- here’s the link.
Do it now! or be happy with what you get.
Correction to the PuffHo article:
Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1941 where his father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service.
The U.S. religious right has buckets of cash to throw at their candidates in election campaigns at all levels ~ there isn’t an equivalent fund for secular candidates, as far as I know, other than via contributions from certain wealthy individuals. The playing field needs to be levelled a little. opensecrets.org HERE is a useful resource for finding out about U.S. lobbyist shenanigans. e.g. Total official spending by lobbyists in 2010 was an astonishing $3,510,000,000