Pretty ordinary for 1988, sadly. But even today, we LGBTQ people are sometimes (more often than you might imagine) faced with "reasonable" people like that agnostic in your group who insisted that religious people/groups must be respected and accommodated with respect to their anti-LGBTQ beliefs and practices. This has constant toxic consequences. For example, all over social media, Christians and Muslims often post passages out of their "holy" books detailing how queer people should be mistreated and killed.
Think you can just report those quotes or conversations and get them taken down?
Almost never!
The same arguments are employed that that agnostic employed in your meeting. "It's religion, so it gets a pass from the regular rules. We must respect their religious faith."
Makes me want to scream and pull my hair out!
I know that a minority of Christians are okay with us queer people, and I respect and love those Christians very much.
But for religious people in general who morally condemn us, I hold nothing but contempt, and I feel just awful understanding that I'm not allowed to express that contempt, because society says I have to respect religion.
I can't even begin to describe how disgusted that makes me feel. How third class and defenseless it makes me feel. I can't even describe how terrible it is to know that religion is protected like that, even when it's unspeakably evil and even when people of good will recognize it as evil.
I'll never forget the circumstances after a famed singer from Lebanon, who was also a lesbian activist, committed suicide in Canada. Several days later some of her fans and supporters approached me asking if I could help publicize Facebook's failure to suppress foul hate speech about her.
Thousands of people were defacing Facebook memorials with vicious language about gay people, framed in religious terms, Muslim terms, often with quotes from the Quran.
The intensity of the hate speech was shocking, as message after message said that queer people deserve death.
Would Facebook do anything about that? No, not even when presented with petitions signed by many thousands of people. Yet, the messages under those memorials plainly violate Facebook's community guidelines.
Obviously, Facebook was making an exception based on protecting religion.
This is just one of the reasons why I recognize religion as such a toxic, evil force in the world, so often.
And people like that agnostic person at that meeting all those decades ago are the reason.
They are as despicable as the religious people themselves, perhaps moreso, because they are consciously urging respect for superstitious evil.
And here we queer people sit in the crosshairs.
