Are Anti Gay Marriage and Anti Racial Integration the Same

In a recent essay in a religious site, an anti-gay marriage Catholic needled members of a Jesuit order for saying anti-gay marriage is a product of hatred toward gay people. The author noted this was the argument Justice Kennedy used in advocating marriage rights. Kennedy's opinions said decisions cannot be based on hatred of some group.  The Catholic Brothers are saying Catholic opposition to gay marriage should not be based on hatred either. The link author thinks Catholic gay marriage opposition is not based on hatred. It seems inevitable it is. 

An old history keeps being repeated over and over. A group is singled out as inferior and hated. A religious justification is found and used to justify withholding rights and equal treatment. When the guilty parties are confronted, they fold their hands, look up in the sky and say they are only doing what God told them to do. This is what the advocates of both slavery and later segregation did. 

The question of our time is, is this what anti-gay marriage Christians are doing? Are they opposing same sex marriage for religious reasons or for personal distaste for gay people? One thing we can say for certain, today's "religious case" against gay marriage looks exactly like the religious case made against segregation. They look the same.

If today's political flim-flam about "religious liberty" had been in place in the 1950's during the civil rights era, those who opposed integrating schools with both black and white children would have said, "My religion tells me my white children cannot sit in the same classroom or use the same rest room as black children. God put different races on different continents and wants them separated today. It violates my religious liberty to force my children to attend a school with black children." My guess is today's Supreme Court would have sided with segregationists. School districts would have been required to maintain separate schools for non-white children because to not do so would violate the "religious liberty" of white Christians. Religious liberty, then, would be more important than learning to sit in a mixed-race classroom.

To place religion on a pedestal higher than any other issue will make many parts of the population worse off and hold back our ability to compete in the world.