Visiting a partner in a hospital is something of a pet peeve of mine where this subject is concerned. I have no idea why hospitals do this sort of thing, but my personal experience with hospitals is that they tend to be staffed by harried, pushy people with a certain sense of entitlement when it comes to enforcing their rules. That particular issue is one that I have a lot of sympathy for, but it does not excuse the wholesale demonization of Christians I saw in this thread earlier.
Well, to help you understand the why of the hospitals are doing that, in a lot of places in the states it's strictly illegal -- and this is at least in part because of anti-homosexual litigation (The latest anti-homosexual marriage law in Florida, ferex, prevented
heterosexual couples who were not married or in civil union from visiting their partner in the hospital.). Family and only family can visit a hospitalized individual without some significant hoop jumping (when it's allowed at all) and going around that can have significant legal ramifications.
And, to reiterate, what you saw wasn't a wholesale demonization of Christians -- it was targeted dislike for a particular portion of them that exhibites a particular form of prejudice.
Again, to be very specific, what we are talking about here is an openly gay woman demanding to partake of a religious sacrament that she did not qualify for under the tenets of the religion.
Heh, I think you could well agree that both yourself and others have taken the matter being discussed beyond that specific issue.
The Bishop over the church involved said that the priest should not have publicly condemned her, and even that was not accepted by people posting about the issue here.
Mm... you've read the clarification on that point. The reason it incensed people here is because of how the church stated it. Saying the equivalent of "We're sorry he got caught doing it" doesn't garner much sympathy.
So bottom line, churches have to do whatever any non-Christian demands of them or risk being characterized as bigoted. I think perhaps in this case some folks outside the church are the ones being belligerent, demanding, and self righteous here.
You're blatantly overstating things here, though; Christian churches don't have to do "whatever any non-Christian demands of them," but they certainly can't expect to not be censured when what they're doing is seen as inappropriately discriminatory (i.e. bigoted). That religious practice doesn't exempt said practice from moral scrutiny is something we can both agree on easily, I hope.
How did it GET stigmatized?
Did God come down out of heaven and stigmatize it?
I have shown several examples from several different cultures where it somehow repeatedly gets stigmatized. How is that, do you suppose? "I don't know" is not a particularly heartening argument for forcing the normalization of a behavior that has collected a lot of stigma all over the world for millenia.
Last point; here, though -- as been noted, racism and xenophobia have also repeatedly caused the stigmatization of individuals throughout history. Repeated stigmatization isn't sufficient support for discrimination.