The Secular Coalition For America (SCA) is a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization that lobbies our elected officials in Washington and now they want to expand into Ohio to cover state and local political issues of interest to secular Ohioans. I have volunteered as co-chair to form the Ohio chapter. We need your help.
The Secular Coalition for America is a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States. We are located in Washington, D.C. for ready access to government, activist partners and the media. Our staff lobbies U.S. Congress on issues of special concern to our constituency.
Our member organizations are established 501(c)(3) nonprofits who serve atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheistic Americans. Their purpose in founding the coalition was to formalize a cooperative structure for visible, unified activism to improve the civic situation of citizens with a naturalistic worldview. A number of additional organizations have endorsed our mission statement.
One project the SCA has been working on is forming chapters in each state to follow our issues on a local and state level and lobby our elected officials.
The Ohio chapter is currently being formed and we are looking for help. The first step was getting an executive committee started. Myself and Christina Shultz are co-chairs but we have a need for people for other leadership spots such as communications or lobbying chair and we also need people who may not want to have a leadership role but want to help get the chapter off the ground.
Religious people have a large well funded political organization that lobbies the government and we can see their results on such issues as abortion and laws that continue unfair religious privilege in Ohio.
Seculars need to have the same kind of organization and lobbying religious groups have to influence the government on our issues. The main difference between a Secular Coalition For Ohio (SCO) and one of the well funded religious lobbying groups is that we are non-partisan. We fight for separation of church and state in our laws and public policy.
Anyone interested in helping out can send an e-mail to Ohio@secular.org or join one of our monthly conference calls. Details, agendas, and other information is available on the chapter web page http://OH.Secular.org If you register on that page you will get information on state issues as well as invites to the conference call and other official events.
We are also on Facebook
The next Ohio chapter conference call is Monday, November 18, 2013 – 6:00pm EST
If you aren’t in Ohio, you can find other states on the SCA website. Help them out too if you can.
So what does this mean for my blog, Secular Left? While some posts might be more Ohiocentric going forward, I don’t intend on changing or stopping this blog. All posts on this blog are my views and not necessarily the views of SCA or SCO.
