I’m curious what the legal reasons for not wanting to affiliate AA with the march are.

What matters is that the board voted and instructed Ellen “no march”, and she did it anyway, under AA’s banner.

Dave,

What matters is that the board voted and instructed Ellen “no march”, and she did it anyway, under AA’s banner.

If this was a problem, then why did you do a post on it and elicit support from us here on this site? That predisposed me to think it was sanctioned by the organization, just that there were no funds to cover it.

And I would like to ask Frank, just how are he and the board going about the process of finding a new president?

Because I work for the President, and do not have access to the board meetings. I was unaware of the conflict, so I did what the President told me to do. This is still the case.

As to the next president, I would guess the answer is “we are endeavoring to find the best person to fill Ellen’s huge shoes, and are employing all appropriate means to that end.” You know, something really definitive.

Rusty, my guess is that’s exactly it, and the board needed to drop her immediately (as opposed to after the march) for that reason.

And now I vent …

Unfortunately I thought the Bill Moore Freedom Walk was one of the best things anyone representing atheists has done in a long time. Before I heard of the walk I had pretty much decided to let my AA membership expire because there are other organizations that do most of the stuff AA does only better. The walk renewed my enthusiasm for AA enough to change my mind.

Of course now I’m sure I’m not going to renew, not because Ellen was fired, but because the direction I’d like to see AA go is apparently not the direction the Board is going to take it. I truly hope I’m one of the few members who feels that way because I still want AA to succeed (whatever that means).

I’d be curious to hear from other posters, what is it that makes you want to be a member of AA as opposed to (or in addition to) other organizations?

For me I think it has been two things. First I just liked being a card carrying atheist, though that stopped being fun a while ago. Second I thought that Ellen and Dave (and Ron Barrier before Dave) did a pretty good job of publicly representing atheists in a positive way.

The magazine, the protests, and the legal actions – that’s stuff I don’t really care about or that other organizations do much better than AA. Of course if you discard all those things, I’m not sure what’s left other than just promoting atheism as a positive, moral, rational way of being. Not sure how you do that, but that’s what I’d like to see.