But you should have. We all should have. By it’s very nature, all religion is conservative. A conservative is someone who wants to conserve the status quo. They’re against progressive movements, no matter what they are.

Their tolerance has limits. It always has.

As soon as any group pushes or progresses far enough the status quo, they’re gonna start to get antsy. They’re gonna worry they’re losing grip of the status quo. They’re gonna push back, or try to drag people back to the status quo.

A backlash against LGBTQ, race equality, and feminism was always inevitable. Those backlashes are always brutal. Always. Because to convince people to return to the status quo, you have to demonize the group that stepped out of line. You have to threaten them to slow or halt their progress, you have to take out their leaders (one way or another), you have to make people see them as an enemy, a clear and present danger, and you have to make sure your own rank and file fall into line and don’t speak out against this change in their own group.

And we all know what happens then.

This is how authoritarianism works.