Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.
Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society.

from MetaFilter:
A recent poll ranks atheists as America's most distrusted minority. Despite some inroads into American's acceptance of religious diversity, distrust of the godless appears to have held steady. Should atheists evangelize, or perhaps follow in the footsteps of certain Christian fundamentalists and seek an Atheist Homeland? The sticks and stones seem endless, after all.