Second, while a state government can forbid gay marriage for no better reason than to satisfy irrational bigotry, the private sector cannot afford such a move.
For openers, they do not acknowledge a plain home truth about discrimination: Some of it represents irrational bigotry, some of it mere self-interested rationality.
However, a lack of evidence hasn't stopped countless liberals, editorial boards, pundits and stand-up comics, not to mention administration officials, from propagating the idea that Obama's problems boil down to the irrational bigotry of his opponents.
NOM toured Iowa over the summer, fanning the flames of irrational anti-gay bigotry and getting leading Republican presidential candidates, including Michele Bachmann, to sign the notorious NOM pledge.
On the other hand religious belief that ignores the role of reason in religion is mere superstition and will result in bigotry and atheism, for "an Irrational Religion can never Rationally be conceived to come from God" (Occasional Thoughts, p. 36).
Read and employ arguments from God is not Great in which Christopher Hitchens contends that religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children".
Religion, in God Is Not Great, is 'violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry'.
In it he argued that religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry", notching up sales of more than 500,000 copies.
We are in a defining battle between the resurgence of the irrational, and all the horrors that have historically gone with it — violence, bigotry, fascism — and reason, with all the advances that have accompanied it — justice and freedom for all, regardless of ethnic background, social status, gender or sexual orientation.
But if you can't distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas -- like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male 'honor' that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls -- you are doing real harm to our public conversation.
Bigotry disguised as religion is still bigotry.
