But what you're suggesting isn't real. Religious ideas ARE privileged and protected over other ideas. For example, the Catholic Church teaches that you and I are depraved and disordered. That's in there official catechism, that they teach the hundreds of millions of school children around the world every day.

I call out Catholic nuns and priests as disgusting pieces of shit for that. They sincerely believe that I'm depraved, so I sincerely despise them. They are vicious and cruel to teach those things. They are also deeply superstitious and ignorant.

That's not because I'm anti-Catholic. I don't care about the Catholic Church. If people want to go to church, that's neither here nor there to me. More power to them.

But when they start calling for laws and policies to enforce their demented, superstitious, nonsensical notion notion that you and I are depraved and disordered ... then we should be able to fight them tooth and nail.

We should be able to call them out as disgusting and evil ... Because it's true. When Pope Francis called us all faggots (in Italian) a couple months ago in enforcing his ruling that gay men may not train for the priesthood, he was being a bigot. He was being harmful. He was hurting lots of people who don't deserve to be hurt.

When he and the Archbishop of Canterbury flew to Africa and announced unequivocally that gay people are sinful and that the doctines specifying that are important to both their churches, they were encouraging violence. (They say that's not what they were doing, but they were using their superstitious ideas to hurt people.)

I'm sure their evil words produced (even more) real homophobic violence in Africa, against innocent people who don't deserve it. Violence is surging against gay people in much of Africa, and the people committing the violence constantly reference their Christian religious beliefs as justification.

Yet when I call that monstrosity out for the evil that it is, people tell me to stop being anti-Catholic.

That is such bullshit. Of course I'm not being anti-Catholic. I'm speaking up strongly against bigotry and mistreatment of marginalized people. Real marginalized people, not imaginary marginalized people who choose to believe things, and in this case who choose to believe bullshit with no objective basis.

But we're not supposed to do that, in many circles, because religious ideas are elevated to a place of special privilege.

We have to stop doing that.

We must treat religious ideas exactly the way we would any other human idea. And if those religious ideas are ignorant, superstitious bullshit, we should call it out for exactly what it is.

Without any fear of being called anti-religious.