Going to a public high school was a big change for me, especially because I hadn’t been a part of a public school since elementary. Walking through the halls, I quickly discovered that small high schools in small towns don’t exactly scream “equality.” I heard homophobic slurs in the halls and racist comments spoken by many of the boys. One kid, in particular, backed up his prejudices claims with religion; his own religion. Then I became aware that there is something as a society that we need to address: it isn’t okay for humans to use religious freedom as a way to discriminate. In fact, it has hurt numerous people over the course of our history, such as slaves and the LGBT community. To explain my reasoning behind why it isn't okay, I have written about the following five points: What religious freedom truly is, how it’s been interpreted, how it has been used to protect racism and hurt women’s rights, and finally, how it has used to justify malice towards the LGBT community.

To begin, the definition of religious freedom, or freedom of religion, according to the website Dictionary, is “the right to choose a religion, or no religion, without interference from the First Amendment”. With that being said, it’s perplexing there are people who continue to use their right to believe what they want to shame others. Although our country’s first amendment right is the freedom of religion, that right shouldn’t overpower our right to have equality under the law. Instead, equality should stand above it. That might be hard to do; however, because it’s way too easy for people to use religion as a justification for their actions. For instance, Christians may pick verses out of the Bible to benefit their argument, whether it’s good or bad, and as stated by the website Odyssey Online as of July 2016, “...we often use religion to excuse ourselves. We use it to opt out of potential situations that may be dangerous to us, and not often enough, we use it to excuse ourselves from taking action, claiming things are “against our religion.” With that said, religion has hindered a great number of people from standing up for issues, or have pushed them to stand up for the wrong issues. Those who stand for the wrong issues have been misinterpreting their religious freedom and it’s boundaries, and that is something that needs to change.

In addition to the last point, religious freedom should be interpreted differently than it has been in recent times. Instead of harming others, religious freedom should be bringing people together, and not be used as a weapon. Religions such as Christianity shouldn’t use and interpret the Bible in ways the help defend close-minded opinions. Using verses such as Romans 1:26-28, Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 to explain their prejudice isn’t okay. According to the website Pew Research, 31% of the people (as of 2015) on earth are Christian; however, times are changing, and young individuals are leaving the religion due to close-minded opinions. Instead of using those verses to hate on or the undermine other people, perhaps people should find other verses that, when used, can make people feel better about themselves. With that aside, there is an immense amount of issues with the way people are interpreting freedom of religion as of today. The issues with these interpretations of religion and religious freedom have caused harm to several people. These mistaken interpretations have resulted in a large amount of prejudice, with some of the prejudice being linked to racism.

To continue, religious freedom has affected racism a great deal. It has been used to protect and has affected many forms of racism, one in particular being institutional racism. Most institutional discrimination is seen in the workplace, such as prejudice in the medical field. Institutional racism is seen even more through racial profiling. In the media, we continuously see people of color being shot or detained by the police force, even if some haven’t done anything wrong. Institutional racism is seen in churches too, where people of a racial group are denied a high position in the church. However, it isn't only institutional racism that has been influenced by religion, but also direct and indirect racism. Direct racism, as stated by the website Equality Humans Rights, is “when someone treats you worse than another person in a similar situation because of your race”. The website also gives an example of direct racism, stating that if someone were to sell something to a person of color, like an apartment or a house, but refused to because their customer wasn't white, those people would be showing direct racism. As of today, there are still humans on this earth who refuse to give service to others because of their skin color, and some of those people support their actions using religion. Although direct racism is frequent in today's society, indirect racism is also seen in everyday life. In fact, it is more prevalent than direct racism. Indirect racism, unlike direct racism, is a more difficult concept to grasp. Many people, especially kids, tend to say racist things without intending to, mainly through jokes and banter. According to website About Equal Opportunities, jokes and banter are harder to deal with than other types of indirect racism. Their reasoning behind that is that the majority of kids justify their actions by saying that they were simply joking. For instance, a kid may say “God hates blacks”, and although he might not have meant it and was saying it as a joke, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t racism. With all of this said, I would like to add that it isn’t just racism that has been impacted by religion. Women's rights have also been affected.

Furthermore, women’s rights have been affected by religious freedom, too. Throughout history, religion has prevented women from being in positions and jobs of authority, such as president, governors, or even owners of companies. It was only a half a century ago that women in Catholic churches were allowed to really become pastors, and still some churches today refuse to let women be higher positions in the church. It isn’t just Catholic churches that have held back women, but other Christian denominations and Islam have too. In the Bible and the Qur’an, according to the website Patheos, there are numerous verses that specifically put down women; verses such as 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which states that women are supposed to be and remain silent in church and that they shouldn’t be allowed to be leaders. Pew Research also states that other versus include Exodus 20:17, 1 Timothy 2:11-15 , and Genesis 3:16. Although these verses have been disregarded by various churches in the world, it doesn’t mean that they’ve been disregarded by every church, and so women’s rights are still under the influence of religion in 2018. In addition to women being influenced and impacted by religion, another group known as the LGBT community shares some of the same inequitable treatment.

Lastly, the LGBT community is one more group that has been influenced by freedom of religion. In a recent study from the University of Michigan, it stated the following: “Most respondents (65 percent) reported saying "that's so gay" at least once on campus in the past 12 months, and 31 percent reported using the phrase 10-plus times. Nearly 90 percent of the students reported hearing “that's so gay" at least once on campus; 63 percent indicated hearing the phrase 10 or more times.” With that said, colleges have problems with treating the LGBTQ community with respect.

With that aside, there have multiple occasions where people have refused to give service to them and help them all because of who they love. Conservative Christian and religious groups are the most common that refuse to give service to others, despite one of their religious morals being to serve God and others. If it truly is about serving God and others, then why have they refused to give service to LGBT folk in cases such as the Masterpiece Cake Shop vs Craig and Elane Photography vs Willock? The answer is simple. It’s all about their religion. In Elane Photography vs Willock, which happened in 2006, two lesbians partners wanted to have Elane Photography- a public business- take their wedding photos. As stated by the website ACLU as of December 2012, Elane turned the couple down, saying that if she took their wedding photos it would violate her religious beliefs. A similar thing happened in Masterpiece Cake Shop vs Craig, which happened over a decade later, where the baker of the shop turned down Craig and his soon-to-be-husband when Craig asked him to make them a wedding cake. In both scenarios, it was their religion that “prohibited” these owners to sell or provide service to LGBT people. If I were to state it simply as people, and not LGBT people, then it would be odd, wouldn’t it? These two cases both used religion to justify their actions, specifically their biased actions, towards other human persons because they didn’t favor a particular aspect of someone. In this situation, it was LGBT folk that were hurt, and they will continue to hurt if our society doesn’t do something about it.

In conclusion, religious freedom has been a tough topic to discuss when it comes having equality under the law, and there are many instances where religious freedom has wrongfully overpowered equality. Using religious freedom to discriminate isn’t okay, and, as stated earlier, has harmed many people over the centuries and will continue to do so if we don’t speak up. When people use it to protect racism, silence women and harm LGBT adults and youth, the world isn’t becoming better, but worse. To this day I still hear insults towards blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and LGBT people in the hallways of my school. I still hear people make jokes about women. I still hear these things, and I’m fed up with hearing them. It’s time that as a society we take a stand towards this injustice, and finally, fight the battle that we started.