Stop trying to substitute your religion for mine!

So here’s what I don’t understand about those who support “traditional marriage”, maybe one of you, if you can avoid the hate speak, can explain it to me rationally. Here’s my question/thesis.

Last time I checked we live in a secular democratic republic, correct?

Conservative faiths of all brands love to remind us that we were founded by faithful people, correct?

Those faithful people saw fit not only to not name a national religion, but also prevented the federal government from establishing a state religion in the future, correct?

And for the past 232 years, we have created this nation based on religious freedom, the freedom to worship as we all see fit, correct?

 

So how does this work this morning, when I go to the public square of my city, Civic Center Plaza, in San Francisco, California, to participate in an inter-faith prayer service for the California Supreme Court as they prepare to hear oral arguments this morning and determine if a majority of Californians can take away the constitutional rights of a minority of Californians; and we are having a nice service celebrating our queer spirituality and the bigots who believe that my desire to marry a man instead of a woman is somehow going to ruin marriage for heterosexuals, come over and try to disrupt that service. You don’t see me showing up to some conservative church in Orange County on Sunday morning when they are praying that I will die because I’m gay, trying to disrupt their worship, no! That would be disrespectful of their PERSONAL religious beliefs. But you cannot extend those very personal religious beliefs and impose them on all of the people in this great nation, that is not permitted by the constitution of the State of California or the United States of America.

Having been quite conservative in my faith at one point in my life, I can understand how this happens, but it MUST stop. We must learn to live together if this country is to survive.

Make no mistake, rights, including marriage, for the LGBTQI Community are Civil Rights in every sense. What happens for proposition 8 will forever influence how any given majority treats any given minority in this country. We must stand together; all minorities, sexual, racial, gender, religious. We must protect each other’s rights, even if they are not in line with our personal beliefs. That is the only way that this great nation will survive.