Secular Student Alliance

Secular Student Alliance (SSA) is a non-profit organization that promotes atheism/agnosticism/secular humanism in high schools and colleges.

As of June 2016, the SSA's Board of Directors has fourteen members.

Secular Student Alliance and Richard Carrier sexual abuse allegations

The Campus Fix reported in July 2016:

“

Atheism activist Richard Carrier ...champions an “intersectional” strain of atheism that promotes social justice. And his reputation now lies in tatters... Carrier is on the receiving end of a growing sexual-harassment inquiry by a national student atheist organization that has featured him as a campus speaker. Yet he continued speaking to Secular Student Alliance chapters at numerous universities over the past year, even while the national office was “fully aware” that he had harassed students, according to his accuser, who stayed quiet more than a year before going public earlier this month. As a result, Carrier has been banned from a prominent atheist conference and even from writing on his own blog. He told The College Fix he would commence legal action in the next two weeks to clear his name. In a Facebook post June 15 that was removed right before this story’s publication, the former president of the Arizona State University chapter of the alliance, Amy Frank, said that Carrier “sexually harassed me and touched me a year ago after speaking at ASU.”... ‘I’m not even close to being his only victim’, and there are even more victims of other speakers of the SSA,” Frank wrote, calling abuse “fairly common” at its events. She accused the alliance of “go[ing] out of their way to undermine the reports,” and said she would boycott it until its leadership is “completely dismantled.”

”

Atheist PZ Myers declared at Freethought Blogs:

“

One of our writers, Richard Carrier, has been banned from Skepticon for “his repeated boundary-pushing behavior”. This is, obviously, a serious accusation, and we’ve been investigating further. We now have several first-hand reports of persistent, obnoxious sexual behavior in defiance of specific requests that he cease. We believe his accusers... After a review of the evidence so far, Richard Carrier’s posting privileges have been suspended, pending further evaluation, and all comments on his blog have been closed.

”

August Brunsman and polyamory

As of 2016, August Brunsman is the Executive Director of the Secular Student Alliance.

Richard Carrier reported in 2016 that Amanda Metskas, the national Executive Director of Camp Quest, are dating and "she and her husband, August Brunsman, are publicly polyamorous."

Carrier was a speaker for the Secular Student Alliance when he was accused of sexual harassment.

Report of fundraising problems

See also: Atheist fundraising vs. religious fundraising and Atheism and charity

In October 2015, the Secular Student Alliance tweeted that it "desperately" needed $100,000 by the end of the month. The SSA Executive director August Brunsman reported that fundraising had lagged.

Secular Student Alliance's website loss of Google referral web traffic

See also: Internet atheism

The Secular Student Alliance's website lost a large majority of its Google referral web traffic from its peak Google referral traffic according to the leading web marketing website SEMRush.

Google uses over 200 factors to evaluate the quality and the relevance of a website to various topics.

External links

• Secular Students Alliance website