Very often, when the title of an article is a question the author already has the answer prepared. In this case, I genuinely don’t know the answer. Against that, while several prominent atheists have recently been loudly proclaiming their own self-serving answer to this question, I suspect that they are not any more informed than me on this topic.
Here’s Colin Wright and Michael Sherlock telling us that Atheists For Liberty is the “only one atheist organisation untouched and uncorrupted by gender ideology and Wokeism”.
Here’s David Silverman in a video of himself that he recently published, making much the same point:
“The atheist movement has left the building … we’re about to lose everything that we have fought for … make a donation to Atheists for Liberty. They are literally all we’ve got left … they are run by a 26 year-old kid and it’s all on his shoulders.”
The AfL team have no more evidence for their circular-back-slapping than the gender-woo people do for being “born in the wrong body”. It is trivially easy to demonstrate that these statements are plain flat wrong by providing Atheist Ireland as a counter-example. This is the only atheist group in the world that actively advocates at the United Nations, and they have at no time accepted or promoted gender ideology. Moreover, those who recently resigned from FFRF in the context of a disagreement about gender ideology, have themselves promoted CFI as another secular group that has remained immune from gender-woo.
It reflects very poorly on the AfL team who publish these false messages, that they would dismiss the effective international secular campaigns of all other atheist groups as being “corrupted”. In fact, not alone is it demonstrably the case that many other atheist advocacy groups have had no involvement whatsoever with gender-woo, my suspicion is that a large majority of atheist groups fall into this category. That is, whereas the repeated egotistical statements from the AfL team would have us believe they are exceptional in this regard, I would bet that their position is in fact banal and mundane.
I have not carried out any formal research in this regard. I cannot provide any more data than the AfL team have provided on atheist groups worldwide and their positions, if any, on culture-war issues. However, I was the Secretary of Atheist Alliance International for several years and I have since remained in touch with dozens of atheist groups that were part of that umbrella organisation. While I haven’t read every single word that they have all published, I’m only aware of a small minority that have taken the same position as FFRF and the other USA-based atheist groups that have advocated for gender ideology.
The AfL team tell us that FFRF have done much damage to atheist advocacy through their recent censorious position with respect to gender critical views. I think this is true, but pompous and self-absorbed pronouncements that falsely place all other atheist groups in the same category as FFRF, will also do much damage atheist advocacy.