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(82,333 posts) Wed Jun 8, 2016, 12:42 PM Jun 2016

The weaponization of religious liberty

Rusty Thomas of Waco, Texas, preaches outside the Rowan County Clerk's Office in Morehead, Kentucky, on September 14, 2015. The issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky and other states has become the latest focal point in the long-running debate over gay marriage, which became legal nationwide following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June. Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Chris Tilley

By Peter Montgomery | 56 mins ago

(RNS) For the second year in a row, more than 100 pieces of anti-LGBT legislation were introduced in state legislatures during the first few months of the year, many of them promoted as measures to protect religious liberty. How did something as fundamentally American as religious freedom become a culture war weapon against LGBT people and their families?

The religious right has a long history of equating criticism with persecution, and portraying political losses and legal defeats as attacks on faith and freedom. Its followers have been told for years that feminists, liberals, and gays are out to silence people of faith, and even to criminalize Christianity.

There’s a sinister logic to the strategy: It is easier to convince fair-minded people to support discrimination against their gay neighbors if you first convince them that the gay rights movement is out to destroy their churches and families.

But as more Americans came to know their LGBT family members and friends and discovered they were not the demons the religious right made them out to be, the movement to win cultural acceptance and legal equality for LGBT Americans built momentum. And as marriage equality started to become a reality, conservative strategists tried to regain the moral and political high ground by reframing the debate as one of religious liberty.

http://religionnews.com/2016/06/08/the-weaponization-of-religious-liberty/