Then there was the other side, and I was honestly taken aback by how many homophobic people there are. Could it be because you find it unnatural – as unnatural as left-handedness, different hair, skin, or eye colors? Or could it be because it was written on a piece of paper centuries or millennia back – papers that have obviously not been subjected to ‘reinterpretations’ by every generation of humankind who over time have been taking it less and less literally? Do I even need to remind everyone about the evolution of the interpretations of slavery in the last two centuries in these papers? Is this what having a sense of entitlement that only your group possess a monopoly over Truth and Righteousness looks like – to condemn our fellow human beings for who they are? Are we really going to let a piece of a paper let us discriminate against a group of people – the same piece of paper that also says that the greatest and only unpardonable ‘sin’ is wrong beliefs? Not wrong actions, but wrong beliefs. And what is sin but a construct of different groups across varied geographic and cultural locations. What is sin for me might be steak or a hamburger for you. And that truly baffles me – how can anyone say ‘how do these people believe such ridiculous things?’ and then say ‘this is wrong because this paper says so’? Quite simply, where is empathy? We follow every sentence literally and blindly like sheep till it affects us negatively, then we choose to reinterpret it till we become comfortable with it. And we call misguided or wrong whoever doesn’t accept our interpretations. How can we be so hypocritical and lacking in empathy for another group? How are we not ashamed in condemning any group of people who have done no harm to anyone, but who just happen to be different from us – be it religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation? Isn’t it the same fanaticism of seeing the world in Black and White, and Us vs Them that has been tearing apart our species since time immemorial?