In the struggle against LGBT rights, many have tried to make love an evil and ruthlessness a good. In the middle, between the ideologues, are a mass of people who in the last twenty years have come around to the light and realized that perhaps love is just love.
Despite that, there is a much darker aspect to the hatred spat towards the LGBT community. The reason anti-LGBT hatred is so bad isn't just because homophobia is a form of bigotry (duh) or even because anti-LGBT discrimination denies our humanity.
The most disturbing aspect about the struggle against LGBT rights, about groups like the Family Research Council, American Family Association or the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, is that many of the people who run these organizations have meaningful and enduring friendships with people in our community.
It's one kind of thing to point at monsters like Neo Nazi groups, the Klu Klux Klan or the Topeka, Ka.-based Westboro Baptist Church and say, "They are evil." Of course they are, but that's too easy. Anyone can point at a photo of Hitler and say, "He was evil." What about all the people who helped him get there? What about the Germans who never made up their mind to be good or evil and just looked the other way?
We have to remember that a large cross-section of the American public, albeit not a majority, separate their own positive feelings towards gay people from the moral and political choices they make in life. Many of these people have gay relatives, gay friends, gay co-workers and even harbor positive stereotypes about gay people. Yet, when they walk into their voting booth, or when they pray to god, they view our love as a form of sin and are unable to make the most obvious of moral conclusions -- that being gay is not a choice and that we were meant to be this way.
The scientific and spiritual proof is out there.
Time after time, people who harbor anti-gay religious beliefs state that they have difficulty reconciling the "words of the bible" or some other religious text, versus the spirit of love and acceptance in their faith and their own communion with god. On a more basic level, these people refuse to look at the ignorance of the past as ignorance and aspire to a higher morality.
Scientifically, there is no proof to say that being gay is a choice, or that there is anything wrong with being gay other than the way LGBT people are treated. Despite all of this evidence, many choose to hold on to their ignorant views in what is, at this point, a painfully obvious conclusion.
In other words, almost half of America has learned how to split their soul. They can love gay people, or love some part of gay people, but are unable to make the next jump and take moral action on our behalf. We have to ask ourselves: Are the right-wingers good Christians, or just good Germans?
When large groups of people suspend their own moral decision making, when they split their spirituality and their vote from the proof before their own eyes, it's definitely a sign of a growing immorality. Yet, the immorality is not coming from us -- it's from those who have been faced with a clear choice between right and wrong and, for whatever reason, still choose the darker road toward bigotry and self indulgence.