Posted by Hemant Mehta in The Washington Post ran a terrific profile of atheist activist Ellery Schempp the other day.
If the name isn’t familiar, his Supreme Court case certainly is:
His protest began a half-century ago, when Ellery Schempp opened the Quran during his high school’s mandatory Bible reading time and silently scanned passages he was too nervous to actually read.
That minor rebellion led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that outlawed school-sponsored prayer.
Ellery is also one of the nicest atheists you’ll ever meet. Check out the article and the book about him.
[tags]atheist, atheism, Madalyn Murray O’Hair[/tags]
he sure is. at the last conference, ellery let a bunch of us heathens use his house as a crash house. sweetest man you’ll ever meet. he loved having us over even when we got ourselves lost somewhere in the boston burbs at 2 am.
[...] ran a terrific interview today with Ellery Schempp (the man who helped put a stop to mandatory school prayer decades ago) and his biographer Stephen [...]
[...] is the man who, as a boy, played a major role in getting forced prayer out of public schools. He’s a freethought hero, if ever there was [...]