Sunday, January 19, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Write Stuff

Prominent Las Vegas atheist uses letters to the editor to spread message

Mel Lipman, a Las Vegas attorney, was recently elected president of the American Humanist Association. Here, he holds the file containing a collection of letters to the editor he's penned, a key part of his strategy to convince the public that it is wrong to discriminate against people because they don't believe in God. Photo by John Gurzinski.

Mel Lipman is on a mission to change the world, one letter to the editor at a time.

"This," he said, sitting in his Las Vegas garage-turned-home-office and grasping a 2-inch-thick binder full of the letters he's written, "is just over the last five years."

Lipman, 66, estimates he has penned hundreds of letters to local newspapers, as well as to papers as far away as Pensacola, Fla. He said they have served his purpose.

"I want to make it known that others believe as we do," he said. "I've gotten lots of calls from people who say they saw my letter to the editor and were glad to know there were other people like them."

Lipman is arguably the most prominent atheist in Las Vegas. He is a founding member of the Humanist Association of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada, and after serving as its president for four years, is now poised to take his message to a national audience. This month, Lipman was elected president of the American Humanist Association.

"My biggest concern is to counter the propaganda from people who think that people who don't believe in a supernatural being can't live moral, ethical lives," he said.

He said his top priority will be to change people's attitudes about humanists. It is not OK to discriminate against somebody, he said, simply because they do not believe in God.

"For atheists and nonbelievers, we're living in dangerous times," he said. Indeed, he said, they are the last group of people against whom it is widely considered acceptable to discriminate.

Lipman believes it would be nearly impossible for an atheist to get elected to public office in the United States.

"The people wouldn't even elect a dogcatcher who didn't believe in a supernatural god," he said.

Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said people who cherish religious freedom couldn't have a better advocate than Lipman, who is a former board member of the local ACLU.

"Mel is nothing if not unwaveringly principled and relentless in his efforts to maintain the proper separation of church and state," Peck said. "He cares very deeply not only about the need to prevent government from promoting a particular religion, but also about keeping government out of religious business."

Both Peck and Lipman say there's a big misconception about humanists in general, and the national organization in particular.

They are not anti-religious.

"He believes very deeply in religious freedom," Peck said. "But he understands that you can only have real religious freedom if you keep government out of it altogether."

Lipman said his journey, from the eldest son of poor New York immigrants to a political activist, was a slow one.

He was raised Jewish in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, N.Y., back when the area was populated almost entirely by immigrants from Eastern Europe. His parents had come to the United States from Russia in the late 1920s.

Lipman's father sold bedsheets, pillowcases and other linens from a pushcart on the city's streets.

When Lipman was 14, his father had a debilitating heart attack. Other health problems followed, and Lipman said he found himself supporting the family on the $30 or $40 a week he made delivering racing forms to newsstands.

He kept up with his schoolwork, however, and earned a scholarship to Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. He married at 20 years of age and had two children.

In the meantime, Lipman said he attended law school at night while working full time as a bank teller at a credit union during the day.

He passed the New York bar exam in 1966, but never practiced law there. Instead, he went on to work in banking, eventually becoming a supervising examiner for the Federal Reserve System.

In 1975 Lipman moved his family to Las Vegas, where he continued in his government job.

"Basically," he said, "we pulled out a map of the United States and said, 'Where should we go?' "

He retired early, in 1987, and passed the Nevada bar exam a year later. He continues practicing law today, he said, and teaches classes on constitutional law at the University of Phoenix's local campus.

Though his career and passing the Nevada bar was important to him, he said more significant changes in his life had begun earlier with a question from his 8-year-old son.

Did he believe in God?

"Of course," he told the boy, as if the answer were obvious.

But he said the question got him thinking. He wondered if he had always assumed God existed because that's what was expected.

Though they professed to be Jewish, the Lipman family never really discussed their religious beliefs in depth, he said.

"That's kind of what started me on more seriously taking on the issue," he said. "That's when I started to read everything I could get my hands on."

He said he never pushes his beliefs on others. His daughter, Lori Lipman Brown, a former state senator who is now a part-time teacher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that's true.

As a child, she went to a Hebrew school, which her father never discouraged.

"He always gave me and my brother the choice," she said. "In our household, it was, 'You decide.' "

Still, she said, her father's beliefs have been a major influence in her life. She calls herself a "Jewish-humanist-Unitarian-feminist." She was involved in some controversy during her tenure in the Senate when a group of Republicans accused her of being unpatriotic, saying she would not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

She sued -- her father was her lawyer -- and won, establishing that the allegations were baseless.

Lipman said his main goal as president of the American Humanist Association will be to apply the philosophy of freedom to choose on a larger scale.

He envisions leading a civil rights movement for humanists similar to movements that have opposed discrimination based on race and on sexual orientation.

One of his tools, he said, will be more letters to the editor.