A bipartisan majority cleared the way this week for the U.S. Senate to consider legislation that would protect legal recognition for same-sex couples’ marriages even if the far-right Supreme Court majority overturns the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling. And like clockwork, anti-LGBTQ activists put their fearmongering about the Respect for Marriage Act into high gear.
If the apocalyptic warnings from far-right religious and political leaders during debate on the bill had any grounding in truth, the years since then would have brought about the criminalization of Christianity, prisons filled with pastors who preached against homosexuality, and conservative Christians piled into boxcars and sent to concentration camps. Influential Christian nationalist “historian” and serial liar David Barton told a California church that sponsors of the hate crimes law—which explicitly targets violent crimes—wanted to make it a federal crime for preachers to read Bible verses denouncing homosexuality. Religious-right leaders and far-right members of Congress falsely claimed, without the slightest evidence, that the law would create legal protections for bestiality and pedophilia.
More than a decade later, of course, none of that has happened. No preachers were dragged from their pulpits. Far-right Christian leaders are still quite free to rage against legal equality for LGBTQ people, and political operatives are free to run political campaigns that smear us with dishonest propaganda. Freedom has survived, and the campaign against the federal hate crimes law has been exposed as a lie.
But old habits are hard to break, as the all-too-familiar rhetoric from religious-right leaders this week made clear:
It’s important to note that the religious right’s claims about the Respect for Marriage Act are not only rejected by the Mormon Church. The law is backed by 40 religious organizations that represent millions of Americans from different faiths.
Moreover, opponents of marriage equality do not come close to speaking for most Americans, most people of faith, or even most Christians. A survey released earlier this year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 68 percent of Americans support marriage equality, as do most white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and majorities of Black, Hispanic, White, and multiracial Americans. Almost 80 percent of Americans, including about two-thirds of Republicans, support laws protecting LGBTQ people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing. About two-thirds of Americans oppose allowing business owners to refuse to provide products or services to gay or lesbian people based on their religious beliefs.