Indeed, as far as I can tell an atheist/agnostic (the latter would be me and my father) who's minimally respectful of the religious will have a much easier time

Indeed, as far as I can tell an atheist/agnostic (the latter would be me and my father) who's minimally respectful of the religious will have a much easier time of it here than a conservative (that would also be me and my father) in those various enlightened big cities and industries. As long as you can tolerate the occasional born again Christian who wants to save you (again, politeness goes a long way). As for LGBT issues, if I just restrict it to "gay bashing", the lists here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_against_LGBT_people#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_a... and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_against_LGBT_people#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_a... show that big cities are not even vaguely immune to the problem. (Although I'd caveat those lists of incidents based on the ones I actually know something about: Harvey Milk and George Moscone weren't killed because the former was gay, but because of SF city politics and their murderer's personal problems (that the conviction was for manslaughter with a short sentence, well, the Twinkie defense is another reason SF is infamous). The 1999 Fort Campbell incident was not as generally portrayed, although my information is not citable, comes from the son of a good friend who was there, collected evidence, etc. And lately the beautification of Matthew Shepard has come under serious reexamination.) Perhaps because so many of these cities were and still are very anti-effective self-defense, there's this partial answer to the problem which is much more applicable in "small town America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Pistols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Pistols