feotakahari

I saw a post on Ask a Manager about an office organizing donations to the Salvation Army. The OP wasn’t comfortable with this, due to the Salvation Army’s refusal to support gay people. In the course of suggesting alternatives, a different poster said they wouldn’t be comfortable giving money to Doctors Without Borders because that organization “promotes abortion.” That turned into a derail about abortion politics, so the moderator started removing comments.

One person posted this: “Your website, of course free to moderate the comments as you see fit. But sure – abortion as a nonstarter for charities is off-limits but Christian affiliation/views are a legit concern. Word.”

This was the moderator’s reply (emphasis mine): “Why wouldn’t the topic of religiously affiliated charities at work — in the comments on a post about exactly that — be on topic? Abortion politics aren’t relevant to the question the letter writer asked. (That said, little of the conversation here is about religious affiliation; it’s about discrimination.)”

The moderator was expressing her thoughts about religion and discrimination in the same sense I would think: that the two are separate categories. How religious you are is unrelated to how anti-gay you are, and statements you make about the fact that someone is anti-gay are unrelated to statements you make about the fact that someone is religious. Someone who is not religious may be anti-gay, and someone who is religious may not be anti-gay.

The poster she responded to was thinking in the sense that being religious and discriminating against gay people are synonymous. If you don’t like that an organization discriminates against gay people, then you don’t like that this organization is religious. If you ask an organization to stop discriminating against gay people, then you are asking that organization to give up being religious.

I understand now why all those anti-gay people insist everyone else is being intolerant of their religion, and frankly, the thought scares the hell out of me.