Bigotry From Cradle to Grave

By Denise Shannon, Conscience Magazine. Posted March 13, 2006.

In the world view of the Religious Right, there is no place for gay people and their 'homosexual agenda.'

On November 8, 2005, voters in Texas, where I live, and in 10 additional states passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, joining 11 other states that had done the same a year before. The results of all these referenda, hardly unexpected even if disappointing, were thanks in large measure to the efforts of an array of religious leaders and organizations and their allies who use fear and ignorance to mobilize followers.

These ballot initiatives were only the latest tactic in a 30-year movement to deny civil rights to gay people. Since the burgeoning of societal tolerance in the 1970s of gays, lesbians and the transgendered, the U.S. cultural landscape has seen a corresponding intensification of focus on homosexuality by the (mainly Protestant) fundamentalists we have come to know as the Religious Right.