Why "tolerate" people who hide behind religion to excuse their bigotry? [View All]

[Misunderestimator]

Seems to me that we have a lot of new anti-progressiveness creeping in from people who defend their personally chosen religion against all attacks, be they reasonable or not (admittedly, it's a certain few and by far not the majority of Christians here, thankfully). How is this any different than tolerating a right-wing fundamentalist conservative who would come in here and defend the likes of Fred Phelps? To me, there's no difference between the hatred of Phelps towards homosexuals and the hatred of the new pope towards us. It's indefensible to me.