Dan Savage on Despising and Discriminating Against Gay People As Quick Path to Cheap Grace

Dan Savage comments on the recent vote in Springfield, Missouri, to repeal an ordinance protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination:

These would be the same religious conservatives who spent the last two weeks insisting that "religious freedom" laws aren't about legalizing discrimination against LGBT Americans. . . . 

So... how did we get to a place where not being able to discriminate against LGBT people is perceived by millions of American Christians as a discriminatory infringement on the free expression of their "sincerely held religious beliefs"? 

Here's how: Religious bigots have spent the last 35+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars working to make "Christian" synonymous with "antigay bigot." Blocking the movement for LGBT civil equality by reinforcing anti-sex/antigay bigotry has been the explicit, stated, lavishly funded mission of politicized American Christianity since the founding of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1979. And while the LGBT civil rights movement has made great strides—the pace of progress, particularly in the last few years, has been absolutely staggering—today millions of American "Christians" regard hating LGBT Americans as a defining tenet of their faith. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was a movement under way to have "We believe gay people are icky" added to the Nicene Creed.)

And:

And these "people haters of faith" aren't out there arguing that homosexuality is just another sin. No, no: It's a sin like no other, a sin up there with murder, a sin that's actually worse than murder, a sin that's worse than all others Check out this interview with a florist in Georgia who told CNN that she would refuse to serve gays and lesbians . . . . 

Here's what's neat—and by "neat," of course, I mean "insidious"—about the elevation of homosexuality to worse-than-all-other-sins status: It requires nothing of the heterosexual believer. Hating LGBT people is easy. Straight "believers" don't have to give anything up to get right with God, they don't have to make any sacrifices, they don't have to stop masturbating or fornicating or adulterating. Despising gay people and discriminating against gay people is a quick path to cheap grace.

The graphic appears at a number of blog sites, including eisakouo's Only by hearing will you hear site, but none of the sites using it appear to identify its source.