National Day of Reason Replaces National Day of Prayer. Thank God.

Evangelicals, as we know, are hell-bent on turning the good, old USA into a Christian Nation, and they've made great headway since they installed George W. Bush in the White House.  Take, for instance, the Christian conservatives' campaign to stamp out sex among teenagers.

Thanks to $1 billion dollars spent on their abstinence-only sex education classes, a quarter of teenagers in this country (and half of African-American teenagers) are now infected with sexually transmitted diseases.  Ignorance, it turns out, is not always bliss.

Another of the evangelicals' lame-brained ideas was to hijack the National Day of Prayer, turning it into a exclusively Christian conservative event. 

A little history: The National Day of Prayer, originally called the National Day of Prayer and Meditation, was created  in 1952 by a joint resolution of Congress during the Truman administration.  In 1988,  Ronald Reagan, at the urging of evangelical Christians, set the first Thursday in May as  the annual date for the event.

Originally, the National Day of Prayer was intended to be inclusive.  Not any more.  Shirley Dobson, wife of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, is in charge of organizing the nation-wide event, and according to the Christian Science Monitor  , while she and her fellow Christian conservatives encourage government leaders' involvement, they reject direct participation by those of other faiths and non-faiths.

(Footnote: James Dobson is one of the founders of the Alliance Defense Fund which is presently defending the Town of Greece  against a lawsuit in federal court having to do with the town board's illegal sanction of sectarian prayers before its meetings.)

Recently, those of other religious persuasions (and some who reject religion altogether)  have decided enough is enough.  A group called Jews on First, for example, has initiated a campaign for an inclusive prayer day and  hold alternative services and stage protests outside the evangelical-planned events on  the National Day of Prayer.   

And, in 2003, a group of humanists, atheists and other secularist and freethinkers came up with an idea of their own.  They  created the National Day of Reason to be celebrated on the same day as the National Day of Prayer. Instead of praying, many of those people do  something they feel is more practical.  They sponsor blood drives: