Johnny Depp: Withdraw your speaking engagement at the 2016 Reason Rally

To Johnny Depp,

    I was greatly disturbed to learn that you plan on being a speaker at the 2016 Reason Rally. Like many people, I admire your support of such worthy causes and charities as Children’s Hospice & Palliative Care Coalition, and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Like many people, I delighted in a recent viral video of you- in character as Jack Sparrow- meeting with a young fan in a Brisbane hospital. It is obvious you are a thoughtful man with great concern for your fans, which makes it all the more mystifying that you should lend your name to an event as divisive and antagonistic as the so-called Reason Rally.

    At the 2012 Reason Rally, keynote speaker Richard Dawkins urged the crowd to mock and ridicule religious believers “with contempt”. Performer Tim Minchin led the crowd in songs that profaned the names of both God and the pope,— the same pope who is a spiritual leader for millions of your fans, and the same God who is worshipped by yet millions more of your fans.

    Perhaps your familiarity with the Reason Rally is superficial enough that you take its professed values of reason, rationality, and scientific-mindedness at face value. The true values it embodies aren’t quite so admirable, once you peer behind the gauze of its own obsessive self-congratulation.

    By lending your celebrity to this event, you will not be supporting the acceptance of the secular community by society at large; rather, you will be supporting a hostile and insular fringe of the secular community in their rejection of the beliefs and values of millions of Americans. Should you choose to appear, you will share the podium with the same Richard Dawkins whose concept of “reason” amounts to little more than mockery and ridicule.

    If you see yourself as a celebrity ambassador for secularism, please know that your appearance at this event will not promote any understanding. The atheists of the Reason Rally are not asking to be accepted as equals, they are demanding to be accepted as superiors.

    If your appearance is meant only as an iconoclastic lark, please know that you will only be validating an increasingly closed-minded atheist dogmatism.

    Make no mistake, by lending support to this event, you will be spitting in the eyes of tens of millions of fans who have supported you throughout your career. Good sense, decency, and- yes!- reason should compel you to withdraw your speaking engagement at the 2016 Reason Rally.