Every young association, whether as trivial as collecting fans of a particular author’s writing or as grandiose as an emergent political ideology, sooner or later has to decide how it feels about issues outside its original mandate.  Labor unions have to decide how they feel about the food in workplace cafeterias.  Book clubs have to decide how they feel about treating gay people badly.  Political movements have to decide how they feel about anthropogenic climate change, whether their country should react to the ongoing clusterfuck in Ukraine (and if so, how), and whether they think it’s okay that American political orthodoxy still imagines that preventing pregnancy in the unwilling isn’t part of the healthcare system’s responsibilities.

And the atheist movement, if there is a single thing that can be called such, has had to sort out its sentiments on a variety of issues.