It’s mildly awkward when you spend years trying to articulate something, then somebody else does it in a day.

Heina Dadabhoy at Heinous Dealings, responding to my last couple of posts:

The worst experience I had was at a local conference about mental health and LGBT issues. Fully half of the panels were about religion, and every panel had a representative of what was euphemistically referred to as ‘the faith community.’ To their credit, the conference organizers included me as the token atheist. I tried to represent those of us LGBT folks who have been harmed by religion and want no part in it. However, I found myself the subject of subtle and not-so-subtle digs by my fellow panelists that went unchallenged by the moderator. The expectation was that I would agree with others’ ‘live-and-let-live’-style statements and accept the ‘teasing’ I got for being an atheist lest I sound like an intolerant naysayer.

It is bizarre, to say the least, to sit in a room filled with LGBT folks and hear nothing but praise for religion and disdain for criticism of religion. Any mention of the homophobia in Christianity or any other religion was treated as if it were taboo, or at least unnecessarily hostile. I found myself feeling an odd sense of longing for the openly-homophobic Muslim I had encountered on an interfaith panel I had done at a local high school. He at least acknowledged the anti-queerness in his faith rather than pretended it didn’t exist and wasn’t relevant to the discussion.

Why should we atheist queers have to capitulate to religions, the very institutions that have vilified, demonized, abused, tortured, and murdered us in the name of their beliefs? Our views on the harms of religion have the realistic precedent. The (a)historical revisionism that casts Jesus as a queer ally and depicts religion as benign at worst and helpful to LGBT causes at best is factually dubious and actively exclusionary.

Well, damn. (Read the rest. It’s worth it.)