Student Activist Award

In 1996, Pelham High School senior Adam Butler of Alabama requested the right to form a freethought club at his high school, right in the middle of the bible belt, where religious clubs were rife. The principal shot down his right to do so under the Equal Access Act, but Adam persisted. Enlisting the help of the Alabama Freethought Association and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and insisting on his rights, Adam succeeded in founding the club.

He went on as a college student to found the Birmingham Freethought Society, a campus group, also working hard as communications coordinator for the Alabama Freethought Association, a Foundation chapter. In the spring of 1997, his campus society counter-picketed at a "Save our Ten Commandments Rally" held in Montgomery, Ala., to challenge rogue Judge Roy Moore and his efforts to use his court to promote and endorse the Ten Commandments. The group was interviewed by everyone from national TV, where Adam appeared, to The New York Times.

In December 1997, Adam led a delegation of freethinkers to protest a manger scene displayed on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. Adam was instrumental in erecting a freethought solstice sign on the steps to counter the manger display.

After a crude bomb set off by a religious terrorist exploded at the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic, Birmingham, Alabama, on July 29, 1998, Adam worked actively with the newly-formed Emergency Coalition for Choice. He helped the coalition organize a March 7 rally at the clinic, a March 10 tree-planting ceremony at the site of the crater left by the bomb, and a March 14 program of remembrance for the death of a security guard and the brutal maiming of nurse Emily Lyons.

For these and many other examples of freethought activism, Adam Butler received the student activist award.

Foundation staff member Dan Barker handing college awardee Adam Butler a check.

Pelham's First High School Freethinkers Club Forms

Equal Access Strikes Back

Alabama's Conspiracy of Ignorance Continues
Freethought Today May 1997

Freethought Today, January/February 1998
Signs of the Times

Photos by Brent Nicastro