Your Opinion: Religious beliefs not relevant to discussion

Dear Editor:

I would like to reply to the letters written by Edward Bode and Harold Horstmann that were published on May 3. Both men expressed their belief that the establishment of laws and jurisprudence that provide protections for LGBT people would somehow infringe upon their religious liberties.

However, I could not help but notice that neither one of them actually provided one example in which this would be the case, so I must beg the question: how exactly would giving same sex couples and sexual minorities the same rights that heterosexuals already enjoy infringe upon your ability or right to believe and practice your religion the way you choose?

To answer my own question, it wouldn't. No one is asking religious ministers or institutions to perform ceremonies they do not wish to, and no one is asking any religion to change its doctrine to include religious validation for non-heterosexual couples.

Human identity is complex, being both multifaceted and intersectional. Throughout history, in every society, people have been stratified based on identity characteristics both inherent and adopted. The United States, as a progressive nation, was among the first to address the necessity for people to be free to live with pieces of their identity that can be adopted, as it granted the freedom of religion to ensure that every person can worship as he or she sees fit, and granted the freedoms of speech and press in order to protect the power and sanctity of ideas and information.

Later, the United States began to address the rights of those individuals whose marginalized status came from certain aspects of their identities that are beyond control and inherent from birth, as it established the right to vote for women and nonwhites, and defined American citizenship as being inclusive to people of all races.

The arguments these men make were also used to fight integration, interracial marriage, and citizenship rights, and have rightly been thrown into the trash bin of history. This may be a hard truth to hear, but your religious beliefs simply are not relevant to this conversation. The United States does not establish laws or freedoms based around the doctrine of any religion, and no "free" country leaves the rights of its citizens up to religion or up to a vote.