“Those people need to use a separate bathroom.” “I should not have to serve them.” “It says in the Bible that what the government wants me to do is wrong.” “You can’t expose those people to my children.” Do these justifications sound familiar? You may think these are new statements being used in the current political and social climate that has been brewing in the last few years in this country and around the world. In the twenty-first century, these types of justifications are being used to support discrimination against the LGBTQ community, but all of those statements were previously used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to justify racial discrimination and segregation. As a country founded on principles of religious freedom and religious liberty, it is fascinating just how religion has been used in this country. Since the founding of this country, citizens of the United States have used religion as a way to justify their actions against each other, sometimes with government “assistance” and sometimes without. Many of the religious freedom and religious liberty arguments currently being used in the various litigation against LGBTQ rights are not new.
As a member of a racial and religious minority in the United States, I am acutely aware that differences are not always celebrated and are more often than not used to pit one minority group against another for the “crumbs” of acceptance as “true” Americans. It is most distressing to me when my fellow minorities use the same language and justification for any type of discrimination against other minorities.
There is a reason that so much of the playbook of the civil rights movement has been adopted for the LGBTQ movement. There are so many similarities in how opponents of the civil rights and LGBTQ movements have used religious freedom and religious liberty to justify actions. The infringement of religious liberty has become a dog whistle. Religious freedom has become a weapon. I use the terminology that religious freedom is now being used as a sword instead of its original purpose as a shield. What do I mean by that? Instead of it being used by individuals to protect themselves (as a shield), it is being used to infringe on others’ rights under the guise of religious freedom (as a sword). Some would argue that these religious beliefs are sincerely held, and people should not be judged or discriminated against because of their religious beliefs—as if to say, “because I claim that it is religious, you can’t question it.” What is most interesting is that some of these “religious” beliefs are aligned with political affiliation or cultural norms and not necessarily from a religious “source,” such as a scripture.
As we learned in school, the original Pilgrims were fleeing religious persecution and wanted to start over in the “New World” with the freedom to practice their religion. We now know that this “history” is a whitewashed interpretation of what happened and why religious freedom was so important to them. Remember at the founding of the United States, the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment were not for everyone but only for white male landowners. White male landowners used these rights to subjugate the rights of everyone else. Even though nowadays it sounds absurd, for hundreds of years, American slavery was justified as having a biblical basis. Can you even imagine that the atrocities of American slavery were ever associated with a religion? Today, Christians are offended justifiably when you mention that the Bible was used to support enslaving a group of people based on their race.