We’re #1 Where It Matters

At least the evangelicals have some sort of systematic beliefs, however insane, behind their bigotry – what excuse have those 34% of unaffiliated folks got for their homophobia?

Ewan does make a good point. Personally, I’d rather see the evangelicals remain anti-gay. It helps to identify the idiocy and bigotry that can be expressed through religion.

Wow. I used to think homosexual bigotry was burden, balanced cognitively with religious self rightness, the removal of which would make the burden too much to bear. I guess there is more to it than that, its a shock for me to see those numbers come so close to a
coin toss. I was hoping to take more pride in being number one.

66% in the “Unaffiliated” category isn’t exactly a number to be proud of

I hate that “relgiously unaffiliated” is a group in any poll. It just lumps us in with all sorts of fringe nuts who simply don’t consider themselves affiliated with a religion. In no way is it representative of atheists in general.

This is a good point. Note also that when such breaksdowns do occur atheists and agnostics look very different than the non-religious. For example, if you remember the Pew study a while ago that showed that atheists and agnostics knew more about religion than any other group in the US, in order to get that result they needed to separate our either “no religion” or “none” as its own category. In fact, the nones generally performed quite poorly. When studies do try to make this sort of distinction the nones often look very different from the atheists. 

I’d prefer not. If anything, for the sake of the LGBTQ kids growing up in evangelical families. I see nothing good in continuing their growing up in families and communities who see them as fundamentally evil, just to prove our point.

I think that religion has its place and don’t feel a need for it to disappear entirely, so I’d like to see the evangelists change their stance. They will, too. When I moved to San Francisco several years ago, I was amused to see how many churches had signs reading that ALL are welcome. Some specifically said that gay people are welcome. So basically, when the religious groups realize they’re losing massive followers with their discrimination, their tune will change. I’m looking forward to that.

Religiously unaffiliated, as I think a couple commentators pointed out, does not mean Atheist.  I’m not challenging the assertion that y’all tend to be on the forward end of social justice because I know that’s true, but for example, I’m Pagan and I don’t see any reference to Paganism on the graph.  We also tend to be progressives.  Same for Buddhists, Jains, etc.

I’d like them to become more tolerant, because when you start chipping away at their dogma, the faith starts to fall apart even to the followers. 

Know who’s missing from this chart? Reform Jews. We’re pretty damn welcoming. I’d like to see how we rate on that chart! 

I bet their sample size was too small to make any generalizations, there are no Mormons in the chart as well.

My thoughts exactly. As an example but me and my dorm roommate would be grouped under Religiously Unaffiliated. He is a christian that doesn’t associate with any
particular denomination. He’s a far right wing conservative and also he still argues homosexuality is
a mental disease. I am both an atheist and gay. Bleeding heart liberal and all that, too. Same grouping, not anything
alike.

For the purpose of representing demographics of support it seems a rather foolish grouping.

A lot of Christians call themselves “unaffiliated” if they don’t belong to any particular church, or if their church isn’t part of a larger group, like the Lutherans or the AME.

I left the Mormon church over their participation in Prop. 8.  I have many relatives who wouldn’t support gay marriage, even if the bishops and temples legally didn’t have to marry gays.  Every Mormon is different, but I agree, their reasons are bs.

Maybe Mormons weren’t included on the chart because they all blindly follow what the prophet says and it seemed pointless because it was 0-3%   :/

Atheists/Agnostics/unbelievers/etc are too small to leave the margin for error in a lot of these sample sizes.

I would hate to see the White Evangelicals remain ‘that way’.

As mentioned before, it hurts the LGBT youth that grow up in those households; what a horrible life to live.

Secondly, the only reason why I am so against religion is because of their hypocrisy and views like this. If every one who believed in a god, and/or a holy book, kept it to themselves instead of finding every reason to ‘save’ others, and try write their ideals into law, etc., then religion wouldn’t get on my nerves so much. It wouldn’t be so dangerous.

The more progress we make as a whole, the better. I would hope we would welcome all people to think more skeptically and logically. Children are still going to doubt the stories, teenagers are still going to question and have doubts, and with that eventually, adults are going to still leave the churches. I hate the want of having other people to remain bigoted just to get people to leave ‘the church’.

‘The church’ is only evil because of views like this. Imagine if people believed in their magical being, but accepted all people for who they were and actively followed the golden rule. That is what I hope for, not that they stay in the dark ages.

Well…

A lot of those churches with the “ALL are welcome” signs still don’t believe that GLBTs deserve the same rights straight people have—such as marriage, or the right to become clergy in that church. Plenty of churches, such as the Roman Catholic hierarchy, have a bit of a bait-and-switch working, where they proclaim their caring for gays and lesbians but still preach that gay love (or at least—horrors!—acting on that love) is sinful. They’re using a rather weak, if not ridiculously dishonest, conception of “welcome.”

Other times, the individual congregation is GLBT-friendly, but the broader denomination isn’t. (Sort of like the number of Boy Scout troops that ignore the national BSA’s bigotry toward gays and atheists.) Which means GLBT members are fine as long as they keep the noise down and don’t attract the attention of the bishop or national-association president or whatever.

The upshot is that that cheery cover doesn’t always correspond to gay-friendliness inside.

Yes, and “religiously unaffiliated” doesn’t even come close to meaning “rational and skeptical with regard to religious belief”!

Here here, Tea Cosy! Wishing misfortune on others just to make ourselves seem better actually makes us seem way, way worse. If we can’t make our point without banking on the other side being evil (as opposed to just wrong) then we are seriously no different than evangelicals who hope all gays get AIDS to prove how bad our lifestyle is.

I really do think that if you can’t make your point without hyperbole, then you can’t make your point.

It’s interesting to me to see Catholics being higher than any of the other listed religious groups, mainly in that it isn’t a surprise to me. I grew up Catholic, and my Protestant friends would always ask me how I survived in such an anti-gay environment. That always confused me because I never once, not a single time, ever heard anyone in church or Bible class or anything Catholic-connected say anything anti-gay (okay, aside from a couple of middle schoolers, but middle schoolers should never represent anybody). I remember a few homilies arguing FOR better treatment of gay people.

Granted, this doesn’t mean all Catholic churches are cheerleaders for gay folks. I’ve met lots of Catholics (and lots and lots more former-Catholics) throughout the years, and there have been a few who had a much less positive time (Catholics of color usually being the ones with more strict and anti-gay experiences). The majority of them reported apathy to the issue, neither denouncing it or trumpeting it, but just not really caring one way or the other. To most Catholics I met, the Pope was a nice man in a funny hat who lived faaaaaaaaar away on the other side of an ocean, and if we wanted a few Catholic pride parades, they wouldn’t find out.

Like I said, I know a lot of former-Catholics. TONS. But we didn’t leave because the church was anti-gay, or anti-abortion, or anti-evolution, or anti-anything, really. We left because it didn’t make logical sense. That’s all we needed. That’s all we should need to get people on our side.

GSS gives N=53 JEW(3) answers to MARHOMO, if you lump in from 2004-2010. 23 strongly agree, 16 agree, 5 neither, 7 disagree, 2 strongly disagree. So, in the neighborhood of 70%.

Gateway rule! That’s an interesting way to look at it, and you might be on to something. There were SO MANY rules *on paper* and so many were weird that we tended to just skim it and get on with our lives.

I couldn’t agree more, Rosalarian. And as a person who grew up in (and am still around far more than I would like) evangelicalism, I fervently hope, for the sake of gays both inside and outside the church, that evangelicals will wake up and throw homophobia the way of support for slavery.

Honestly, the whole “we hope they stay as evil and homophobic as possible” is just disturbing. Are we also going to wish that evangelical pastors across America become serial killers and engage in organized sex trafficking en masse, so that then people will *really* know they’re wrong? That’s just the opposite side of the coin of evangelicals reveling in the hope that gays will die of some gay disease so that it proves how bad gayness is so that people are scared away from the gay. C’mon, now. We can do better than that.

The Gay Marriage supporters are much more likely to be “C&E” Catholics. Attitudes of  Catholics attending at least twice monthly have shifted less, but also appear to be shifting.

The real problem is that even among the regularly attending, the shift is more pronounced among younger Catholics, and may be even further pronounced among younger Catholic women. (Insert off-color Catholic schoolgirl joke here….) The conservatives have already lost this struggle; it’s just a question of how long the twitching will continue.

Except for the Religiously Unaffiliated which went up in 2004, everyone else took a dive.
I don’t remember but was there a religious anti-gay smear campaign in 2004?

My random, not-terribly-responsive addition:

In fact, the nones generally performed quite poorly.

Actually, on that little quiz every group did really poorly. Atheists’ average score was just a little less pitiful than every other group’s.

Atheist doesn’t always mean “rational and skeptical with regard to religious belief”, either. You can’t just assume that every atheist is also rational (or even intelligent, etc.)

I came up with my own reasoning for birth control as a Catholic: If a person practises abstinence or the “rhythm method” (which is abstaining during fertile times and approved by the Church), then the person is interfering with God’s will for them to have kids. In fact, if a couple aren’t having sex pretty much constantly, they could be denying God the creation of more people. That’s the philosophy behind the Church being against birth control, anyway. You’re not supposed to interfere with God’s will for you to have kids, you’re supposed to have sex and if you get pregnant, you get pregnant. I think abstaining from sex at any time is the same as interfering and placing your will (not having sex to not have kids) ahead of God’s will (make more people). So birth control IMHO isn’t wrong.

 Also, a PS: Thoughb the Orthodox would have you think the rest of us don’t exist & don’t count, the Reform Movement is much larger than both the Orthodox & Conservative Movements combined.

Lumping Conservative and Orthodox Jews todgether with Reform and Reconstruction is akin to saying the (usually liberal, I think) Methodists are the same as the evangelicals.

In my experience, Reform-Jews-as-a-demographic are much more liberal than Methodists-as-a-demographic are; but that aside, I agree with you. And on most of the questions that matter, I don’t see much daylight between Methodists and evangelical Christians. All of the above staunchly support religious faith, religious authority, and religious privilege. All of them keep those poisons alive in the memepool.

I scanned through the comments and didn’t see this point mentioned, so forgive me if I’m just repeating something someone else has brought up, but the graph describes changing attitudes towards gay MARRIAGE, which is not necessarily the same thing as support for LGBT equality and certainly isn’t a reliable indicator of bigotry or homophobia.  I myself am religiously unaffiliated and queer, but I don’t support gay marriage. Though fewer in number than ten or twenty years ago, there are still a number of ‘radical faeries’, ‘relationship anarchists,’ and similar within the LGBT communities who are saddened or even angry that the LGBT movement has been reduced to a one-note, assimilationist marriage movement since the early 90s, rather than being a movement which celebrates diverse ways of living, relating and being and which challenges the oppressive aspects of the prevailing relationship, sex and gender norms. This perspective is, admittedly, a marginal one even within the relatively small queer communities, I don’t wish to overstate its influence and certainly all the excellent points others have made here about the ambiguity of the phrase ‘religiously unaffiliated’ apply, I simply wish to add as a footnote, as it were, that LGBT/queer people are not uniformly in favour of gay marriage; those trans/intersex/androgyne/genderqueer/bisexual/pansexual etc among us are usually overlooked by mainstream society, but we are all too often made invisible in reported research that’s ostensibly ABOUT us.

True enough. I don’t assume anything of the kind, though.

The numbers I’m referring to are the General Social Survey, using Berkeley’s web interface. Start with the “Nones” by filtering either RELIG(4) or RELITEN(4). Consider the position on gay marriage using MARHOMO; values 1-3 support or don’t care, 4-5 are some level of opposed. Use question GOD to break down the Nones into more nuanced categories: response 1 gets the atheists, response 2 the agnostics; responses 3 to 6 give varying levels of theist from deist upward. Using data from years 2008-2010 gives enough data for a slight confidence interval…

…and, whoops, looks like I made a range selection typo before. Include the deists as theists, and it does tip to 3:1. Sorry.

why would that even be bad?