As same-sex marriage sweeps across the United States, religious traditionalists say that they are now being discriminated against.
In a number of recent cases, owners of businesses including florists, bakers, and wedding photographers have lost their cases after declining to provide services for gay weddings,
The Blaze reported.
In separate events this week, Mormon, Catholic, and Evangelical leaders highlighted the need to protect religious freedom for opponents of homosexual marriage,
the Christian Science Monitor reported.
All three denominations argue that defenders of traditional marriage are falsely portrayed as bigots in an effort to silence them.
"Accusations of bigotry toward people simply because they are motivated by their religious faith and conscience have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and public debate," said Elder Dallin Oaks, one of the Mormon Church's 12 governing apostles.
"When religious people are publicly intimidated, retaliated against, forced from employment or made to suffer personal loss because they have raised their voice in the public square, donated to a cause or participated in an election, our democracy is the loser."
Mormon leaders nonetheless sounded a conciliatory note on the issue this week, expressing the hope for an outcome to the marriage debate that would result in an outcome in which "millions of people with diverse backgrounds and different views and values will live together in relative harmony for the foreseeable future."
Catholic and Evangelical representatives, by contrast, emphasized that their deeply held religious beliefs did not permit them to recognize alternatives to traditional marriage. Yet people of faith are increasingly coerced and falsely depicted as bigots for opposing the new orthodoxy on the subject, they contend.
Religious conservatives point to the resignation under pressure of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who was pushed out after employees complained about his support for California's Proposition 8, a ballot initiative barring gay marriage which was passed by voters in November 2008,
according to The Wall Street Journal.
Gay-rights advocates urged users to boycott Mozilla's Firefox browser, declaring that those who
disagree with their position "seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure."
Last year the
California state university system withdrew recognition from local chapters of an evangelical Christian student group because it would not permit non-Christians or openly gay students to hold leadership positions, Religion News Service reported.
A coalition of Catholic and Evangelical Christian leaders, including Pastor Rick Warren and Catholic thinkers Robert George and George Weigel, this week
signed a statement declaring same-sex unions a form of "unreality" and "a parody of marriage."
"If we are to remain faithful to the Scriptures and to the unanimous testimony of Christian Tradition," they said, "there can be no compromise on marriage."