"...And No Religion Too"

Religion should not be opposed, but when the religious take the rights of others, they must be opposed.

Many within the LGBT community have profound issues with religion. They look at most religions with disdain and view adherents with disgust. They voice their opposition to religions that have been traditionally active in public discourse. Not only are they opposed to religion, but they also alienate the believers through insults. They could not be more wrong in handling oppressive religions.

However, the way to do it is not by overtly hurling insults at people of faith or attacking their church head on. While this may be a temporary emotional outlet, it is overall not an effective approach in actually combating religious ignorance. Religion can’t be destroyed, only reduced and controlled.

The Catholic Church, for example, survived the Romans, the early heresies, the Great Schism, the Reformation, the Age of Reason, and communism. Modern-day progressives won’t change this historical trend.

Yet it is without question that the Catholic Church has recently lost a significant amount of influence in the Western World. People simply stopped caring as much, yet they were actively prodded to care less.

From advertisers using sex to sell products, to the diminished position of the Lord’s Day in society, traditional religious thought was challenged indirectly. The result was a mass decline of ordinary Americans’ commitment to traditional religion. Advertisers and corporate bosses achieved what warlords and revolutionaries before them had not: the destruction or severe regulation of Christianity to the private sphere of life. Of course concepts built into our society, such as secularism, laid the groundwork for change.

Ordinary gays and lesbians themselves did much more to erode religiously-fueled hatred by simply becoming familiar with religious Americans than all the overtly anti-religious ever did. After all, it is much harder to use your religion as a weapon if you know the target of your prejudice personally.

That is the key to reducing religion: bleed it dry by attempting to form relationships with its mild/moderate adherents and treating them like human beings. The die-hards within each religious group must be approached in this way because they will not change, but without receptive ears they will lose relevance. The key is to win over people, not crush them. To make tomorrow better than today, acts of hate cannot be matched by acts hate. This probably doesn’t hold true for every situation, but for this one it does.