Rabbi Sherwin Wine and the Birmingham Temple in Farmington Hills are organizing secular and religious humanist groups in Michigan and Illinois as a response to the Christian fundamentalist Moral Majority movement. The new organization is being called Voice of Reason. President of the group is Lynne Silverberg, a member of the Birmingham Temple, of which Wine is the spiritual leader.
Ms. Silverberg said the Voice of Reason has started a fund-raising campaign and is preparing 15-minute radio broadcasts and a pilot television program to counter Moral Majority. Ms. Silverberg said she does not disagree with many of Moral Majority’s positions but objects to their methods. “They smack of McCarthyism,” she said. “They say that anybody that doesn’t agree with them is anti-American… That’s a real threat.”
She added that many people agree with Moral Majority’s positions on abortion and the family. But Voice of Reason disagrees with attacks on the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools and the introduction of religion into the schools, politics and public affairs. According to Wine, the Moral Majority is a threat “to the free inquiry of science and to reasonable people in general.”
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