Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23religion-web.html

The atheist lobby, in the blond, pregnant person of Jennifer Lange, waited with diminishing patience for the elevator in the Legislative Office Building.

Ms. Lange checked her watch one last time, then rounded a corner into the corridor and skipped down four flights of stairs. The back way to Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky's office was just one of those useful things she knew about the inner workings of Albany.

Ms. Lange's mission on this Monday in early February was to scuttle a bill titled the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which she and every legislator on her agenda called in their common insiders' slang Rifra. Of the nearly 10,000 pieces of legislation introduced annually in the New York State Legislature, the act was one of only several dozen brought under the lead sponsorship of the Assembly's speaker, Sheldon Silver. It was not going to be an easy target.

Then again, in her 10 months as the part-time registered lobbyist for the Institute for Humanist Studies, Ms. Lange had already reckoned the difficulty of her task. Alone in Albany, and among just a few comparable figures elsewhere in the nation, she advocates for the political interests of secularists who variously describe themselves as nonbelievers, freethinkers, humanists, atheists, skeptics and brights.

The assignment puts her in competition with dozens of lobbyists for religious entities, including powerhouses like the Catholic Conference, and also individual churches, hospitals, charities and social service agencies. More broadly, Ms. Lange tries to offer persuasion and charm amid a climate of nasty polarization between the faithful and the faithless.

As represented in print by best-selling authors like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, atheism has lately mounted an in-your-face attack not simply on religion's influence on public policy, but on belief itself. From the opposite flank, Mitt Romney used a major address in his presidential campaign to espouse the view popular in pious circles that the United States is essentially divided between the committed adherents of all religions, a k a the good guys, and the secularists, a k a the enemy.

"It's not like I'm coming from Save the Children or something everybody's in favor of," Ms. Lange, 32, put it in an interview. "When you say you're an atheist, people think of negative values, of heathens. People feel that we're antireligious. I'm not trying to change anyone's religion. I don't even want to talk religion or the Bible when I'm lobbying. I want to stay focused on state policy and finding the places we can make common cause."

Such pragmatism is not only Ms. Lange's personal style. Leaders of the Institute for Humanist Studies, an Albany research organization founded in 1999, very consciously studied the religious right, as well as the gay rights movement, as models of successful lobbying.

"We were looking for examples of how a significant minority can mobilize their people and their friends and their families to achieve influence," said Matt Cherry, executive director of the institute. "There's been a tendency for atheists to use only the politics of protest — to be on the sidelines with all your purity — but not to roll up your sleeves."

In Ms. Lange, the institute found an experienced legislative tactician and a disarming public face. Ms. Lange grew up in Peoria, Ill., as a regular churchgoer and youth-group member in a United Methodist congregation. While she recalls having decided by her early teens that she did not believe in God — and being particularly disturbed by what she considered the misogyny of the Bible — she still accompanies her parents to church during family visits to the Midwest.

She put her idealism first into the Peace Corps, spending two years in Guatemala, and then into the presidency of the National Organization for Women's chapter in Buffalo. (In somewhat unfeminist fashion, she had followed a boyfriend to western New York.) She then became a legislative aide to Sam Hoyt III, a Democratic assemblyman from Buffalo, serving two years in his district office and then three in Albany.

Her time in the state capital gave her the practical savvy and personal connections that the humanist institute sought when it hired her last April. As Ms. Lange zigzagged through the office building on that Monday morning this month, she collected busses on the cheek and doting questions about her toddlers, Hannah and John. Her fond relations with the secretaries and administrative assistants ensured that she would get access, timely access, either to legislators or a staff member of consequence.

"Being an insider, I know who you need to know," she said. "I know the process. The bills, the legislation, the budget, scheduling meetings."

At each stop, Ms. Lange made her pitch against the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. While the measure sought to remove any "unreasonable burdens" from religious practice, the State Constitution more than amply protected religious freedom, she told legislators. A new law risked eroding the separation of church and state.

In her search for allies, she made sure to discuss issues like same-sex marriage and comprehensive sex education, on which she and many legislators already agreed. She also lined up sponsors and votes for a coming resolution to declare Feb. 12 as Darwin Day. (It passed unanimously.)

Still, none of the five Assembly members she met with promised to side against the religion measure. Mr. Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester County, chided Ms. Lange that opposing the bill put her on the same side as lobbyists for fundamentalist Christians and ultra-Orthodox Jews, who deemed the measure too weak.

"Politics makes strange bedfellows," Ms. Lange conceded.

At a different meeting with a different Assembly member, Ms. Lange faced a different problem.

Kevin A. Cahill, a Democrat from Kingston, had not recalled cosponsoring the religious-freedom bill in June until she presented him with an information sheet about the measure.

"That means there's another side of the story," Mr. Cahill said, suggesting that he must have had a good reason to back the measure, which is being considered by the Assembly's Government Operations Committee. "You think there's a better way to do this?"

Ms. Lange went into her standard spiel about the State Constitution being the better way. Mr. Cahill, in turn, promised to "look back at what I've done and why."

The day's lobbying was just about over for Ms. Lange. The hallways now belonged to volunteers with canes and dogs, who were lobbying for the American Council of the Blind. Ms. Lange made her final stop with her old boss, Mr. Hoyt.

Seeing her arrive, he declared, "Charles Darwin is in the house."