Margaret Downey
Margaret Downey is an American nontheist activist who is a former President of Atheist Alliance International and founder and president of the Freethought Society. She also founded the Anti-Discrimination Support Network, which reports and helps deal with discrimination against atheists.
Early life
Downey grew up with a Puerto Rican mother and an Irish father. When her father left, she adopted a family friend "Uncle Floyd" as a father-figure who encouraged Downey to become an atheist.Activism
Downey has been active in a variety of causes including feminism and anti-smoking campaigns before becoming a public representative of atheism.Her first major involvement as a publicly active nontheist was when her son Matthew was not allowed to renew his membership in the Boy Scouts of America since he was raised in a nontheist household. This led to Margaret Downey v. Boy Scouts of America, which did not go far in the courts before the United [States Supreme Court]'s 2000 decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale that the Boy Scouts constituted a private organization and could thus choose their own membership criteria, thus preventing Downey from taking her case further. Since then Downey has been a prominent public representative of atheism in the United States as well as representing atheists and other non-theists at United Nations conferences. Her work has been incorporated into United Nations reports on religious discrimination.
She is also affiliated with a variety of other organizations that promote atheism and the separation of church and state such as Freedom From Religion Foundation of which she is a board member and the American Humanist Association of which she is a past board member. In 2003 she was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.