Photo Credit: Flickr
For atheists it is important to know that fellow atheists are getting elected to public positions. For years there hasn’t been a single atheist in public office; or those atheists who were elected avoided speaking openly about their godlessness. When an atheist is elected to some public position it says a lot about the acceptance of atheists in our society in general. In a society where the majority is religious it could be hard for an atheist to build his/hers way up to some public position. One atheist who got elected is Sherry Frost, New Hampshire state representative, a democrat who was first elected in 2016 and openly spoke about her non-religious views and even referred to atheism on social media.
According to Patheos, one of Frost's tweets goes as follows:
"How about we encourage more women and LGBTQ people and People of Color and Muslims (and atheists - HI!!) to run for office so our legislative bodies *look* like our communities? So the people representing us really *ARE* us?"
It is hard not to agree with this statement. Today people are living in a diverse communities and the best way to represent people from some community is to choose representatives from every subgroup which exists in it. The purpose of the legislative body is to represent the will of its people, and that is best achieved if the body is almost a mirror image of the community it represents. As Frost stated, legislative bodies should "look" like communities.
Sherry Frost has no problem to openly state her opinion about different topics and to trigger a reaction with her statements. Her tweets were in the spotlight last year when she stated that "people telling her to calm down make her homicidal" while commenting about a huge number of terrorist actions which happened last year. She also used harsh language on Twitter last year when she talked about the right to keep and bear arms. “My speech is not always pretty or polite but I have the right to express myself in ways that I feel best relay what I witness and experience,” Frost said, according to CBS Boston.
There are more non-religious people in New Hampshire's legislature and Sherry Frost is not alone as an atheist. Tim Smith, a democratic member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives is also an atheist and he strictly used the word "atheist" to describe himself.