Atheism is Indeed A Civil Rights Issue

I would say describing a period where 18 million protestants and two million protestants were either jailed or imprisoned as an "exception" or on a "small scale" is a bit of an understatement. (And the Soviet methods of punishing the faithful, including inprisonment and forced labor in gulags, were just as atrocious as the feeding Christians to the lions in Rome.)By your reasoning you will have to call the spanish inquisition "a small scale exception" in the record of persecution committed by the church as well. More christians were persecuted in the Soviet Union than nonbeleivers that were persecuted in the spanish inquistion.