Via Metamagician, a piece by Brian Thompson of JREF on “diversity” at JREF.
we at the JREF do take diversity seriously, and it’s something we strive to achieve at our events. If the skeptics community is going to thrive and grow, it’s essential that no one feel unwelcome or excluded due to race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
I don’t understand that – it looks like a typo, or a thought-typo. It looks like grabbing an established category without taking the time to think about it and thus notice that it needs tweaking for the purpose.
There’s no sensible or substantive reason to cause people to feel unwelcome due to race, gender, or sexual orientation, but there can be such a reason due to religion (or atheism), for the same sort of reason there can be sensible or substantive reasons to cause, say, socialists to feel unwelcome at a gathering of libertarians or vice versa. That is, people can be caused to feel unwelcome simply by being exposed to ideas they disagree with, and that could easily happen to religious people at a skeptics’ event.
It seems like a futile idea for a skeptics’ organization to commit itself to not causing religious people to feel unwelcome in that way. Race gender and sexual orientation are a different category, but ideas can’t be prevented from possibly causing people to feel unwelcome, without being emptied of all their content and so ceasing to be ideas.