Reason will be coming back to a small Michigan town next week.
The Reason Station, staffed and organized by Freedom From Religion Foundation activist Douglas Marshall, will be put up to celebrate the Winter Solstice in the City Hall in Warren, Mich., for the fifth season running starting on Tuesday, Dec. 3. This commemoration is the result of a prolonged court battle.
In December 2011, FFRF and Marshall sued the city of Warren for refusing to allow FFRF to place a Winter Solstice sign alongside a religious Nativity scene in the atrium of the City Hall. Warren Mayor James Fouts said at the time he would not “sanction the desecration of religion” in City Hall.
While the 2011 lawsuit was dismissed, a 2014 lawsuit filed on Marshall’s behalf by FFRF, the ACLU of Michigan and Americans United was successful. It led to a federal judge ordering the city to allow Marshall equal access to set up a “Reason Station” in the atrium to counter a long-running, privately staffed Prayer Station there.
The Reason Station, staffed by Marshall and other volunteers, will offer information and opportunities for discussion from a nonreligious perspective. It will operate between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday. (Due to the holidays, the station will not be open Dec. 24-26 and Dec. 31.) The centerpiece will fittingly be a “May Reason Prevail” sign, which has a statement by FFRF’s principal founder Anne Nicol Gaylor. The sign reads:
At this season of the Winter Solstice
may reason prevail.
There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell.
There is only our natural world.
Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.
In addition, there will be an abundance of freethought literature available at the station.
Marshall, a state representative of FFRF, received a Freethinker of the Year Award in 2015 from the organization for his courageous activism.
“We are grateful for the tenacity that Doug Marshall has shown in ensuring a space for freethought and reason in his hometown,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It is this kind of activism that will help reason and our secular Constitution prevail.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national state/church watchdog with approximately 30,000 nonreligious members all over the country, including more than 700 in Michigan.