This article is a part of the HPR Pride Month Collection and represents the independent perspective of the author.
In 2015, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made it official: State laws that banned same-sex marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment and were therefore unconstitutional.
Less than three years later, however, the Court switched tracks, ruling 7-2 in favor of a business that refused to serve a gay couple because they were gay. Forcing Masterpiece Cakeshop to serve the couple, the majority decision argued, would unconstitutionally violate the proprietor’s “religious freedom.”
The Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado decision was a brutal reminder to the LGBTQ+ community that we are still legally second-class citizens, no matter how many corporate and political institutions may celebrate Pride or emphasize that “love is love.” That decision, supported by the Court’s conservatives, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan, effectively stated that the humanity of LGBTQ+ people were issues about which good people could reasonably disagree and that our existence was legally less valuable than our oppressors’ hatred.
This Pride Month has been the first Pride that I celebrated as an unabashed openly queer person. I came out in June 2021 after wrapping up my senior year of high school, specifically to avoid talking to anyone about it and, in my mind, “get it over with.” So this year, I have been experiencing Pride essentially for the first time. However, while I have seen immense and unparalleled joy and compassion, I have also seen hatred and unprompted vitriol from the very people whose “freedom” was ruled more important than queer lives in 2018. And as harmful as that decision was independently, I believe that it lent credence to a discriminatory culture that is exponentially more dangerous.
In recent years, the legal debate surrounding LGBTQ+ justice in the United States has become dominated by a debate between equality and “religious freedom.” The minority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, as well as the majority opinions in Fulton v. Philadelphia (decided as recently as 2021) and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado, make this excruciatingly clear. Chief Justice John Roberts even stated explicitly in his dissent in the first case that “many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith.”
Where discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans persists, it persists because of religion.
Campus Pride ranks 180 colleges on their “Worst List” of academic institutions that would be actively harmful for LGBTQ+ students, many because they have either received or requested an exemption to Title IX protections to allow them to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. All of these colleges are religious institutions, and all but one are Christian. Hunter v. Department of Education, a lawsuit organized by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, proves that Title IX exemptions routinely violate the constitutional rights of LGBTQ+ students. All of its 33 plaintiffs attend Christian institutions.
This only goes to show that religious exemptions are not tangential cases of discrimination. Rather, since religious exemptions provide legal cover, the majority of discrimination that LGBTQ+ Americans face is justified through this religious window. When the Biden administration announced in 2021 that it would “vigorously defend” the religious exemptions to Title IX, it was not saying that they would protect LGBTQ+ students in almost all cases while also defending religious freedom, as Biden’s 2020 presidential platform claimed they would. In essence, the Biden administration observed the bulk of legal discrimination cases against LGBTQ+ students in the United States and announced that it would fight “vigorously” for that discrimination to continue.
This is further exacerbated against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalist sentiments in the United States. When hatred and bigotry against LGBTQ+ people force themselves into the mainstream, it is almost invariably because of religion. Hate preachers at Stedfast Baptist Church have publicly called for the mass genocide of LGBTQ+ people. Former Congressional candidate Pastor Mark Burns called for the execution of those who support “sexual orientation communication,” comparing LGBTQ+ teachers and allies to Nazis. Several of the 31 members of the White supremacist Patriot Front who attempted an apparent assault of a Pride celebration in Idaho had connections to churches espousing a misogynistic brand of Christian nationalism.
None of this is to say that violent bigotry is the default position among religious people. Several religious organizations, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, and the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, have publicly supported LGBTQ+ equality for decades, and many local religious organizations have taken independent initiative to become welcoming and affirming spaces.
But even if religion is not entirely homophobic, homophobia today is almost entirely religious. Ninety-seven percent of Americans who say that “homosexuality should be discouraged” profess a belief in God. Of the 65 organizations designated as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, only two have a nonreligious mission. The new platform of the Texas Republican Party claims to “affirm God’s biblical design for marriage and sexual behavior between one biological man and one biological woman.” Other state Republican parties from Oregon to North Carolina all ground their homophobia in religious language, mirroring the national party platform’s assertions of the importance of families based in “traditional marriage … based on marriage between one man and one woman” and “depending upon God.”
Regardless of how or why homophobia first emerged, it is perpetuated today by people claiming a religious basis for their bigotry. Normalizing the idea that discrimination against LGBTQ+ people is just a difference of opinion empowers these hateful people and their violent rhetoric.
I do want to acknowledge how my identity has shaped my views on this subject: I am a queer atheist, and I have never had a particularly positive relationship with religion. I have a tough time believing that any person who refuses to acknowledge my humanity is “good and decent,” no matter how deep their religious convictions may be.
Beneath those personal convictions, however, is a legal question at the heart of the religious exemption debate: Should LGBTQ+ students attending religious colleges have any fewer rights than those attending secular colleges? Constitutionally, socially, and morally, I believe that the answer is a definitive “no.” There is no nonreligious justification to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students. Therefore, there is no valid legal justification to discriminate in a country that claims to have a separation between church and state.
Why would a morally just government permit any discrimination, whatever its motivation? Our country has federal protections like Title IX because discrimination violates people’s autonomy. However, when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity, our government condones discrimination so long as that discrimination is grounded in a religious belief.
The cultural attitudes that enable these policies will not change easily. But there are proactive legal steps that our government can take to create a new culture, one in which discrimination is perceived as injustice in all cases.
First, to remove government funding for blatantly discriminatory institutions, the religious exemption to Title IX must end. Every year, taxpayer funds are funneled to institutions which have petitioned for the right to discriminate against some of their students based on factors out of their control. This practice cannot be allowed to continue.
Additionally, the Senate must pass the Equality Act to ensure that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 is not used as grounds to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people in other spheres, including credit and housing, and to codify the fragile protections LGBTQ+ people currently possess under Bostock v. Clayton County.
Religious discrimination is still discrimination. Religious hatred is still hatred. As long as we say that bigotry is permissible so long as it comes from a deeply-held religious belief, we cannot be surprised when LGBTQ+ people are harmed. Religious motivations are our principal oppressor, so when we condemn homophobia unless it is religiously motivated, what are we actually condemning?
The original artwork for this article was created by Harvard College student Allaura Osborne for the exclusive use of the HPR.
