See answer above. Religion is a matter that goes to the root of someone’s self-identity, while affiliation to a political party does not; it is also something the majority of people feel as akin to ethnicity - it can be changed but only with a strong act of will.
- People don’t choose to be gay or choose to be male. They choose to go public about their intrinsic natures. Not at all the same thing.
- I understand the confusion about classifying participating in a religion as being a choice or being an intrinsic. Fundamentally - it is a choice. It’s also true that choosing not to participate in a religion can carry grave consequences as well.
However, historically, religion has been considered an intrinsic quality, making religious hatred a form of bigotry. Also historically, religion is often dictated as matter of law, making it not entirely a free choice. Furthermore, religious bigotry is, again historically, as often a matter of inter-religion disagreements, often on the most trivial of issues.
Finally, historically, the consequences of religious bigotry have been so dire - beheadings, burnings, centuries long wars - that I believe it’s better to go on treating religious hatred as a form of bigotry, even though in certain countries, people currently have more freedom to choose than has previously been the case.
Historically, religious bigotry has been a blight on humanity and therefore, highly deplorable.
Glad we’ve got that cleared up.
If someone hates Westboro Baptist Church or the ISIS interpretation of Islam, are they bigoted?
I’m of two minds on this. Religion is definitely a choice. And I do judge people based on their willingness to adhere to absurd or patently false ideas. I’m not saying I categorically hate someone because they are religion X, but it definitely counts as a strike against them in my book.
That said, the vast majority of people probably do not “choose” their religion at all. They are born into it, surrounded by family members and a social group that holds the same views, and adopt it as part of their identity and their overall world-view. I do not believe many people in the world actually look at the options and choose their religion as a conscious and willful act. I think this has a lot to do with the reason it is placed as a protected class, along with the fact that people can become fanatically violent about it.
edit: Cross-post beat me to it.
Many people who “hate Muslims” are the sorts who will report a passenger on a plane for wearing a headscarf or reading a book on Syrian art or doing math. These people (the haters) are bigoted because what they actually hate are people who look a certain way. That’s bigotry - a simple sense of hating the “other.” Pure xenophobia dressed up as rational actions.
And (as I now see was pointed out above me on preview), religion is often an intrinsic cultural quality depending on upbringing.
Sure, many anti-Muslim folks are like that, but many others are not. The rift between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, for instance, has become increasingly violent. Many Hindus dislike Muslims and vice versa.
Religious bigotry gets really complicated because oftentimes it’s religious bigotry vs. religious bigotry. **Merneith **mentioned burnings and beheadings as an example of being bigoted against religion - yes, but it was often religious people *doing *the burning and beheadings.
This whole paragraph could be said of political affiliation as well (except for it being a protected class).
A number of years ago my aunt decided that her intrinsic nature was that of a lesbian. A few years after that, she decided she was straight again. Which one of those was her true intrinsic nature?
Bruce Jenner decided he was Kaitlyn, but last I heard he was regretting it and thinking of “transitioning back into a male”. If he becomes Bruce again, is his ‘intrinsic nature’ male or female?
Rachel Dolezal chose her race.
For lots of people, they are fairly indifferent / loosely affiliated with a religion, but passionate about their political beliefs. For lots of people, their political identity is more at the “root” of their self-identity than their religious identity.
Gender orientation may be more ambiguous and unclear for some people than others. That has nothing to do with whether it’s intrinsic nature or choice.
Some people with disabilities have good days when they can function normally, and bad days when they can’t. That doesn’t mean their disability is a choice. Some people are mixed race and can legitimately claim to be one of several races; that doesn’t mean race is a choice.
Seems to me there is a whole spectrum of self-identity - at one end there are things you are born with that are very difficult to change (such as the colour of one’s skin); at the other end are pure choices, which can very easily be changed by most people (such as what colour to paint one’s bedroom).
“Religion”, while in theory a pure choice, in reality is closer to the “difficult to change” end: the vast majority of folks do not in fact convert to the religion they hold; they are born into it. So heaping scorn on one’s religion is more like “bigotry” than heaping scorn on one’s choice of bedroom paint colour.
Choice of which political party to elect is clearly closer to the “choice” end: that’s why countries have elections, rather than (say) just taking a census and assuming everyone will vote the same way every year.
Therefore, heaping scorn on one’s choice of whom to elect is more like heaping scorn on one’s choice of interior decorations, that it is like heaping scorn on one’s religion.
Are we still talking about Rachel Dolezal? Are you claiming that she’s actually mixed race? This video might help clarify that.
So if someone is born into a religious upbringing that teaches that homosexuality is evil (a teaching which millions of religious folks around the world are indeed born into and raised up in,) should that be held against them, since religion is on the intrinsic, cultural, “very difficult to change” end of the choice spectrum?
Who would be the bigot in this situation, the person who says that their religious views oppose homosexuality, or the one who hates aforementioned person for their religious views?
I like this “spectrum” view of the thing, but the logical conclusion to that is that bigotry isn’t really a binary thing anymore either. You can be more of a bigot or less of a bigot, but if religion and political affiliation are both just points lying somewhere along a self-identity spectrum (and with different people those things might be flip-flopped in importance / difficulty-to-change), then one isn’t “not-bigoted” for hating Republicans vs Muslims. At best we can say one might be less-bigoted than the other. Agreed?
No, I was talking about mixed-race people in general.
How about we just don’t hate any entire groups of people? Why isn’t that just the default position? Is it necessary to hate? It’s possible to be critical without hating.
I don’t think anyone is saying that religious folks ought to get a pass in pointing out the hatefulness of certain religious or cultural positions.
The “bigotry” label gets placed on those who are making generalizations about whole groups of people, based on their identity. Those generalizations may or may not be true of specific individuals (or even of specific groups), but not true of the whole.
Someone hating on Westborough Baptists? Simply sensible: it is a true generalization that they hate gays, because it their whole raison d’etre.
Someone hating on all Christians or all Muslims because Christians and Muslims hate gays? An incorrect generalization. So, bigotry.
Someone hating on a specific Black person in the US for being a welfare parasite? Well, they either are or they aren’t. If they are, then it isn’t incorrect.
Someone hating on US Blacks as welfare parasites? Bigotry.
And so on.
So is the OP an example of bigotry then? Certainly there are some Trump supporters guilty of “inexcusable fucking ignorance, fear, and gullibility”, but not ALL of them. Bigotry then?
Can you provide an example of a Trump supporter who isn’t motivated by one of the above?
I’m genuinely curious in what that supporter profile would look like.
At the outset I tried to process the whole of the concept of Trump supporters as some misguided fringe anomaly that I wouldn’t, in a million years, have guessed would eventually snowball into the gargantuan, out-of-control monster that it’s become.
And accordingly, with this almost “Singularity”-type voter growth, my critical mindset admittedly has devolved into a more hating one. It’s not like a lot of constructive, critical discourse can be engaged with a lot of those folk, anyway.