A word about religious bigotry

Bigots don't generally call themselves bigots. Racists don't call themselves racists. And homophobes don't call themselves homophobes.

It's a common mistake to think that anti-gay bigotry isn't really bigoted if the bigot's heart was in the right place. For example, in the quote below from the LA Times, the victim offers the classic "but my persecutor thought he was following his religious beliefs" line.

Condon, the gay writer-director of "Dreamgirls" and a Film Independent board member, offered this retort to what he calls the "off-with-his-head" crowd: "If you're asking, 'Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?' . . . the answer is, 'Of course we do.' But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry."

Well, yes they did. As do conservative Muslims who force their women to wear head to foot black veils, force them to sit in the back of the car, and who summarily stone those women when they're raped. As did southern Christians who argued that the Bible mandated slavery:

"[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts." Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

So since we all supposedly take bigotry against gays as seriously as we do bigotry against blacks and Jews (and in Hollywood, that's an outright lie - tell me how well out gay super stars do once they come out), let's rewrite this guy's quote and see how it sounds:

'Do we take discrimination against blacks as seriously as bigotry against gays and Jews?' . . . the answer is, 'Of course we do.' But we also believe that some people saw slavery not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.

Not as understandable any more. Now replace the word "blacks" with "Jews," and "slavery" with "Holocaust." An extreme example? You betcha. But as they teach you in the law, sometimes you need the extreme example to prove that the logic is not sound. The only reason we accept bigotry cloaked in religion when it's targeted against gays is because we all - all of us - are more tolerant of intolerance when the target is gay. And that's not evidence that the bigotry is somehow minimized, it's evidence of bigotry internalized.