> Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
There are millions of religious people. The ones who view the world that crazy way are a tiny minority and are not particularly politically organized, but are very loud. They're the right's equivalent of the people who advocate the murder of all men as oppressors, or who claim that racism is justified as long as you're not white.
The only reason anybody notices them at all is that they're so conspicuously wrong that their opponents find it convenient to elevate their platform because it's so much easier to knock down than the actual positions held by the majority of the other side.
We're still fighting over abortion and contraception because the other side's position is "people who don't want children should either abstain from sex or give them up for adoption". Reasonable people can disagree with that but that is nowhere near the level of crazy as "9/11 was caused by the gays".
Their position ranges from what you said, to wanting doctors who perform abortions killed, and the mothers who have them prosecuted. Our current sitting president once had that position for god's sake. You can pretend that it's just the WBC and 99.99999999% of decent, "love thy neighbor" types, but it just isn't. About a quarter of the US population is evangelical, and a lot of them are not tolerant of much.
It's not one or two people burning Harry Potter books. It's not one or two people who sent their kids to (and send them) to gay "rehab".
More than 200 million people in the US identify as Christians. Even three million people would be less than two percent. Three orders of magnitude less than that is background noise.
I am saying that identifying as Christian does not actually mean much. It's basically an ethnic affiliation that includes Mormon missionary's, Atheists, monks and mass murders. You can sub divide that into various groups where it actually means something. From some of those groups you can find the people where it means a lot. And from those sub groups you can find 100,000 people making a lot of noise that can very much punch up and have a significant impact.
Now, I am not saying only those 100,000 people have faith, or that all 100,000 share the same beliefs. Just, that they get a lot more attention than normal.
That was my original point. They are a tiny minority of Christians or Republicans or Americans or whatever outer group you like, not "many millions", and the only reason anybody gives them a platform at all is that it's so easy to knock down. Their only relevance is as a patsy to paint a much larger group with the color of their crazy.
To be clear, I don't mean to offend anyone religious, and am not saying this is the usual run of how religious people view the world. Unfortunately, there are many millions who do, and they tend to be loud, and politically organized.
That's what I actually said... maybe you'd have less trouble if you didn't invent things to respond to?
If it wasn't intended to be many millions then what relevance would it have in support of the original claim that "there are many millions who do" have a crazy view of the world?
There are about as many guns in the USA as there are people. Most people would agree that in general, guns are not difficult to find and/or purchase.
If it was truly a widespread view that abortionists should be killed, there would be a great many dead, rather than the 2 high profile cases I can think of, during the past 20 years.
It's not about abortion. The states where a majority of people support abortion already have it. It's not enough, however, for the states that the American left controls to have abortion - they must have it in states controlled by Republicans as well. The fight is about to what extent are states allowed to self-govern, to what extent can people who live in them create the kind of society and culture that they want to live in. One side thinks states should be allowed to do what they think is right in their own jurisdiction, so that different groups with diverse values can peacefully coexist in the same country. The other thinks they should decide what is right for everyone, so that all groups conform to their values, which they perceive to be universal.
Yes, well spotted, it's also the same argument you can use for literally anything else, until all you're left with is a state's right to decide on whether to enact a plastic bag tax or not.
From my perspective, there's little fundamental difference between "abstinence should be the only available form of contraception" and "9/11 was God's way of punishing us for homosexuality."
