I’m late to jump on this as I haven’t been watching Keith Olbermann much lately (preferring Rachel Maddow generally, since she got her own teevee show, hooray for Rachel!), but Greta Christina didn’t let this one slip by.

I’ve clipped this video to only the relevant section, being the Bronze.

The Bronze: To the person who donated the scratch for ten thousand dollars worth of ads on the sides of buses in New York City, promoting atheism. They read, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” The hope, from president Ken Bronstein of the group NYC Atheists, is to get people to stop hiding their non-belief — to stop hiding it. No complaint about the message — however, while Bronstein says, “We want to get atheists to come join us, to get out of the closet,” unfortunately the donor who made the ads possible is keeping his identity anonymous.

This presumes hypocrisy on the part of the anonymous donor. And if it’s hypocrisy, then fine, maybe they deserve a mild rebuke, and the Bronze is usually reserved for the “mild rebuke” spot unless the asshattery overflows the top two spots that day. But still. There are a number of reasons why an atheist might want to stay anonymous; e.g. they are in a public position where their declaration of atheism would earn them a good deal of animus. Like, say, a politician. Or a TV talking head. Or they could perhaps simply be “good samaritans” (heh) who don’t care about building some kind of reputation for themselves; the act itself is a good deed, and they obviously had the money to spare.

And then there’s the fact that atheists in America are actually, presently, the most reviled minority group there is, probably due to successful indoctrination into religion (whether or not the person has since escaped). Imagine that the person who gave up $10,000 of their own money is in a public position and surrounded by religious folks. Being around religious folks in and of itself is not uncommon — I’m sure a significant percentage of everyone you work with and interact with on a daily basis has some sort of faith, whether or not they’re lapsed as far as worshipping. And part of that faith involves being told by the people that believe, that if you don’t believe, you’re a sinner or stupid or evil. So a significant fraction of people would suddenly forget everything they’ve known about you in the past — much like my father did with my sister when she came out to him — and start assuming that they are broken or evil or whatnot.

Scarily, more people in America would vote a gay person into office than an atheist. And the terrorism threat from right-wingers is at an all-time high there at the moment. So that, coupled with the vast number of people that were brought up to believe that walking the skeptic’s path is to be outright evil, and fear suddenly becomes a real and significant motivator.

While I would love for the person who came up with that much money for the atheist bus campaign to come forward, to set an example to those out there who are too scared to self-identify as atheists, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t very real and valid reasons not to do so. Nor should Keith Olbermann. Good on him for not having a problem with the message, but those of us on this side of the argument see much less hypocrisy than he did.