Ask most people what’s wrong with religion and you’ll get some version of the same answer. It’s divisive, it’s authoritarian, it wants control, it insists it’s right every time and everyone else is wrong, it puts its own claims beyond argument, and it makes people intolerant.
This all comes from certainty, a claim to hold the ticket to absolute morality and absolute truth. Once you’re sure, other people’s answers stop being wrong and start being offensive. Discussion becomes a waste of your afternoon, because you already know how it ends. Questions stop being questions and start reading as symptoms. The person across the table stops being someone with an argument you haven’t heard yet and turns into someone who’s lost, or compromised, or a danger to anyone within earshot.
You can reach every one of those positions without ever opening a holy book.
Racism, homophobia, misogyny and bullying are fundamentally wrong and they harm society. I share that belief, and the question that comes before what we do about it is what limits should apply to people who feel as strongly as I do, about values, about truth, about what harms society. In a democracy you can’t run one set of rules for the group that’s certain it’s right, as long as that group is us, and a different set for everyone else. Either you refuse to tolerate a president being drawn as a monkey, or you live with it when the other side draws the next one that way, whatever his skin color.
It gets harder, because the person saying the thing almost never files it under racism or homophobia or misogyny. From where they’re standing, they’re reporting something true, and they’ll often have a number or empirical evidence they can point to.
Who said democracy was easy?
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