Does Atheism Need to be Rebranded?

[mediamogul]

Is there a need to try and "rebrand" atheism by another name due to the negative connotations that have been built up around the label? Or should we be working to reclaim our word?

Here is the paragraph from the God Delusion that got me thinking. (The first part is not specifically relevant but it is still a great point so I left it in)

'Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is
grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label fouryear-
old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their
parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the
caption changed as follows: 'Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a
Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.' Wouldn't this be
a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet,
because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak
was heard, nor is it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine
the outcry if the caption had read, 'Shadbreet (an Atheist),
Musharaff (an Agnostic) and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged
four.' Mightn't the parents actually be investigated to see if they
were fit to bring up children? In Britain, where we lack a constitutional
separation between church and state, atheist parents
usually go with the flow and let schools teach their children whatever
religion prevails in the culture. 'The-Brights.net' (an American
initiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights' in the same way as homosexuals
successfully rebranded themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous in
setting out the rules for children to sign up: 'The decision to be a
Bright must be the child's. Any youngster who is told he or she
must, or should, be a Bright can NOT be a Bright.' Can you even
begin to imagine a church or mosque issuing such a self-denying
ordinance? But shouldn't they be compelled to do so? Incidentally,
I signed up to the Brights, partly because I was genuinely curious
whether such a word could be memetically engineered into the
language. I don't know, and would like to, whether the transmutation
of 'gay' was deliberately engineered or whether it just
happened.150 The Brights campaign got off to a shaky start when it
was furiously denounced by some atheists, petrified of being
branded 'arrogant'. The Gay Pride movement, fortunately, suffers
from no such false modesty, which may be why it succeeded.'

My thought is that it's our word and we should unite under it and be proud of it. The right wing is great at selecting a phrase and then sticking with it like the way they turned "liberal" in to a dirty word. I think we should be atheists and work to fix the public perception of our lack of belief.