I'm a gay guy who grew up in one of the most conservative parts of Texas during the George W. Bush years, so I know a thing or two about insane religious people, but I came off my hot-burning New Atheist phase awhile ago.
It really doesn't matter so much what other people think of your sexual orientation. It's kind of their problem. They can make it your problem but you deal with that when it happens. I try to treat people with a minimum standard of respect, and I expect that in return – they don't have to like or love me, or whatever. That is the most you can expect from people in this world. And I've found myself being able to get along with all kinds of different religious people. I was talking to someone in my socialist group recently who is in the Eastern Orthodox Church – not one of the most socially progressive churches in the world but we didn't have any issues with each other.
More broadly, my view is that religion is a man-made system – it can become interlocked with power structures; such as endorsing the domination of men over women in patriarchal societies. The suppression of homosexuality is another such thing. In any society where gays are oppressed, gays are seen as subversive to the "state of things" as they are. Religious institutions that are interconnected with power structures reinforce these oppressions, but they do not necessarily have to. I have never had problems with Muslims in the United States for this, and it's my understanding their social views (in America) are equivalent to Catholics, making them relatively liberal. The most intense homophobia (here in the U.S.) tends to come from evangelical Protestants. Evangelical Protestantism is the religion of the traditional power structure in America, and even while black Protestants in America can also be quite homophobic, they tend to not to ever organize politically in a structured way for anti-gay crusades like the WASPs do.
Basically, homophobia functions as a weapon inside a larger social control system. What kind of control? The control of men for the purposes of war and empire. This intensified in the age of imperialism because of the need to indoctrinate the male population into warmaking. Men were also conditioned and socially prohibited from expressing emotions other than anger. This is now causing many problems for men as the traditional male-dominated industries are in decline, and because women are allowed to express a wider array of emotions to each other – women developed a broader support base in the women's lib movement and have healthier outlets. Men do not so they are lonely, afraid and angry – see Zig Forums for an example of what that looks like.
Homosexuality points to the possibility of male relationships that are not strictly based on behaviors incidentally useful for imperialism: warmaking, competition, the urge to dominate, refusal to show emotion other than anger, etc. Male children are brought up being told not to act "like a faggot" even when they don't know what that means. You'll hear a lot of young men say things like "oh, faggot doesn't mean gay, it just means… don't act like a faggot I guess." What they mean is that a faggot is someone who expressions the wrong emotions. Religion can help reinforce these things but it's not strictly necessary: a lot of atheistic right-wing homophobes these days have given up the religion and just call us "degenerates" now.
I'm rambling a bit, but religion is sort of a distraction. We socialists should oppose imperialist war, homophobia, patriarchy, etc. – and religious institutions when they coincide and reinforce these things, but that is not necessarily the case.
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