Why Religious Voices are Critical to Advances in LGBT Rights

Quotes about religion are a dime a dozen.  My favorite one happens to be from comedian Cathy Ladman: "All religions are the same:  Religion is basically guilt, with different holidays."

*rimshot*

But there's another quote worth sharing that serves to highlight the intersection between LGBT rights and religion.  It's from Rev. Diana Holbert, who is pastor at Grace United Methodist church in Dallas:

Many people have used the Bible as a club to attack. For years the Bible supported slavery. For years it was used to keep women silent. It has been used and abused to justify systems that enslave and oppress and judge – so that those in power can justify their power-over. So that they can keep others from seeing the sin we all carry within us – the sin of bigotry and idolatry. Believing that someone else is less than we are. That somehow they are unnatural. It is the sin of scape-goating someone who is different from me and mine.

Holbert is one of those religious leaders who has come to bat for LGBT rights and LGBT folks.  And she's certainly not alone.  In the debate over marriage equality, religious leaders have gathered from Florida to Maine to California and beyond to preach a message of inclusion, acceptance and love.

And their message is critically important to winning the debate over marriage.

That's at least the gist of a new study from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which finds that religious voices are critical in advancing LGBT rights.  The study, A Time to Build Up: Analysis of the No on Proposition 8 Campaign and Its Implications for Future Pro-LGBTQQIA Religious Organizing, comes with numerous findings, two of which include:

• Anti-LGBT ballot initiatives are often rooted in conservative religious rhetoric. Effective responses require faith voices and messages to counteract these claims in order to show religious diversity in support of marriage equality and to disprove the notion that conservative religious voices are the sole guardians of morality on these issues; and
• Advocates should not write off certain religious communities as impossible to win nor overlook any "unlikely" allies, be it the Catholic Church, the Mormon Church or African-American churches. While some communities may have official pronouncements against marriage equality and campaign against it, almost always there are members within that community who by conscience have different views.

These mirror similar findings in a report earlier this year from Marriage Equality USA that assessed the No on 8 campaign in California, and urged LGBT activists to bridge the divide between our community and religion.

This messaging couldn't be more important, as anti-LGBT activists prepare to wage a campaign against marriage equality in Maine, as well as fight efforts to overturn Prop 8 in California.  When religious voices speak out in favor of LGBT rights, advocates for equal rights stand a better chance of winning.