I must disagree with David Kovacs’ letter of May 6. He stated that younger people favor gay marriage more than their elders “due to the concerted effort to remove God and religion from our social fabric.”

There is no such effort. When has anyone been restricted from engaging in religious activities in his private life? When will the religious right understand that one’s moral compass often has very little to do with one’s religion, and that we atheists, agnostics and humanists almost universally have our moral compasses fully engaged.

It comes not from the ridiculous fear that we will “burn in hell,” but from logic and reason, from fully understanding that morality and ethics come from thinking and caring about others, from study of what the best good for society may be, and certainly not from religious books that are full of contradictions and downright horror. Were we to follow the morality of Leviticus, actually suggested by some preachers, we would be no better than ISIS.

Kovacs needs to read the newsletter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation to see the moral lapses and degradations toward people by those who don’t just profess religious convictions, but who are leaders in churches across the country. He may then reassess his idea that religion is required to have morality and ethics, or that they naturally follow from religious belief. This is not by any means a Christian country, it is a republic founded on religious freedom, and that includes not believing in a higher power. The framers of the Constitution recognized the problems with state religions and coziness between the state and religion, and wrote the First Amendment to solve that problem. The last thing they wanted was a theocracy.

And so under our Constitution, the law of the land, the 14th amendment should secure the right of LGBT people to marry just as any other citizen has that right. In our country it matters not what any religious book says; if people wish to follow those books, that is their right. But it is also the right of others not to be coerced into following those books if they disagree, and no American citizen who understands the concept of liberty should be complicit in demanding that his or her religious convictions become the law of the land.

Brian Myres

Loveland