We Must Not Respect Sincere Homophobic Belief
By: James Finn
Tags: Religion, LGBTQ, Equality, Morality, Society

Sincerely held beliefs deserve respect

Plenty of people make this banal assertion. I doubt very much they would actually believe it if they stopped and thought for a moment. But the idea is so drilled into our heads from the time we’re small children that we rarely analyze it critically.

Do beliefs really deserve respect just because people hold them?

Let’s talk about it —

Clearly, some commonly accepted human ideas are silly but noble, springing from a place of love. Think on the subject of urban legends. Some real howlers make the rounds, often spread with the best intent.

I suspect most of you reading this essay feel the same. If you see or read about a Klan rally or a white supremacist march, you get mad.

Do you know the one about birds and raw rice?

A widespread belief holds that birds’ bellies explode if they eat raw rice thrown at weddings. “Everyone knows” how dangerous the practice is. Only … there’s not a scrap of truth to it! I bet that surprises a lot of you. But, think about it. How could it be true? In much of the world, rice grows everywhere.

Eurasian Tree Sparrows feeding in a rice field. Wikimedia Commons.

Birds gorge on raw rice in the fields where it grows. Some of them subsist on it. Ornithologists have been trying for years with little success to quash the untrue idea that rice is bad for birds.

Fun fact: According to Snopes, Ann Landers may have first popularized this bit of birdy fake news in one of her 1970s advice columns. With all good intent, of course.

Today, kindly motivated people all over North America and Europe prohibit throwing rice at weddings. Laws have been passed. Fines get levied. Birds look on with hungry bemusement.

Do I respect the belief? Well, no. It’s incorrect.

I can and DO respect that people of good will hold the belief. I can and DO respect people who don’t want poor birds dying in agony. Even though people are misinformed, their motivation comes from a good place.

Lots of wrong ideas don’t spring from good will

In the US, we are witnessing a rise of white supremacist ideology, for example. The people promoting these beliefs push hatred and fear as they urge others to stigmatize, exclude, and harm Black people, Latinx people, and immigrants of color.

Respecting these beliefs is not the same thing as respecting beliefs about not causing pain and harm to birds.

Ideas about white supremacy are immoral in that they tend to decrease human happiness and increase human suffering.

So, I neither respect white supremacist ideology nor the people who promote it. White supremacists are not worthy of respect. I hold them, in fact, in disdain.

I suspect most of you reading this essay feel the same. If you see or read about a Klan rally or a white supremacist march, you get mad. Turn red. Alert the neighbors. Or at least tweet out an indignant squawk.

Oh, you may support the legal principles that allow for even repugnant public speech, but you don’t respect either the racist values being pushed or the people pushing them.

If you’re anything like me, and I hope you are, you actively despise those values. You know that the people who hold them are morally deficient. You know it’s morally wrong to promote beliefs systems that center around excluding, stigmatizing, or otherwise harming innocent human beings.

That brings me to the LGBTQ point of this exercise

If people push ideas that justify stigmatizing, excluding, or otherwise harming LGBTQ folks, I don’t respect their beliefs. If religious people or organizations teach that I’m a sinner or that I don’t deserve full civil equality because I’m queer, I revile them in exactly the same way I revile Klansmen and Nazis.

Toxic beliefs that hurt people do not deserve respect

Any philosophy, world view, or religion that teaches people to mistreat human beings in a minority is seriously morally deficient. Religion is no excuse for homophobia just as it’s no excuse for white supremacy, racism, or sexism.

People who stigmatize queer folks are not benevolent but misinformed. They aren’t doing the equivalent of trying to prevent little birds from suffering. They’re wielding belief like a sword to hurt people for being different.

Their beliefs are in no way worthy of respect

Many people tell me they feel offended when I write things like that. Some people who think of themselves as very nice and loving sit in pews every Sunday, hug their neighbors, and drop money in the basket as they feel good about themselves for contributing to charity.

They don’t stop to consider that the church they’re funding teaches LGBTQ youth to be self loathing or that the denomination they belong to helps fund the fight against civil LGBTQ equality.

“These are my sincere religious beliefs,” they say. “They deserve respect. I’m not a bad person because I follow my religion.”

Sorry, but over 40 percent of homeless youth in North America identify as LGBTQ, and 5 times more LGBTQ youth attempt suicide than young people in general. According to the Trevor Project, religious stigmatization leading to family alienation is the number one reason.

Stigmatizing and scapegoating harmless LGBTQ people is immoral given that it causes suffering and reduces happiness. Plenty of religious people have figured out how to honor God and minorities at the same time.

People of good will and human decency are fighting religious bigotry, and we’re going to keep fighting until no child is rejected by their religious family, until no queer teenager feels driven to despair and suicide, until homophobia is unacceptable and shameful in polite society.

Toxic beliefs don’t deserve respect —

We queer people are simply ordinary, minority variants of human beings. We’re intrinsically harmless and do nothing to rate being discriminated against, excluded from full participation in civil society, or treated as Other or Goat.

There’s nothing respectable about scapegoating, shaming, and stigmatizing people. There’s nothing respectable about branding us as sinners. There’s nothing respectable about causing youth homelessness and suicide.

No, of course all human beliefs are not worthy of respect.

If your religion teaches you that something is wrong with transgender people or lesbians, or bisexual people or gay people, then I’m here to tell you that something is wrong with your religion.

And if you want respect?

Love your fellow humans equally and treat them equally.