Let’s begin with a visit from the ghost of culture wars past. In November 2016, BuzzFeed published a story breaking the so-called news that Chip and Joanna Gaines, the stars of HGTV’s hit show “Fixer Upper,” attended a traditional evangelical church. But that’s not how BuzzFeed promoted it. The headline tells the story: “Chip and Joanna Gaines’s Church Is Firmly Against Same-Sex Marriage.”

The story came a year after the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

There was no evidence in the BuzzFeed story, however, that the Gaineses had discriminated against anybody. There was no evidence in the story that HGTV had engaged in anti-gay discrimination. The story did, however, cast aspersions on the Gaines family because of the beliefs of their church and its pastor.

The Gaineses’ church wasn’t a radical outlier. Its beliefs about sexual morality — that sex should be reserved for marriage and that marriage is the union of a man and a woman — are in line with the Catholic Church, Orthodox churches and virtually every major denomination in evangelical Christianity. They reflect my own beliefs as well — though I supported the Respect for Marriage Act because it protects both the right of gay people to legally marry and the right of religious institutions to define marriage according to their own beliefs without fear of state punishment.

The fact that a Christian holds those beliefs no more makes him or her an anti-gay bigot than holding to traditional Christian theology renders Christian believers Islamophobes or antisemites.

In a pluralistic society, people will differ on extremely important things — including eternal matters — but disagreement should not be equated with disdain. The fact that others disagree with you is not proof that they possess low character, or that they’re inherently prejudiced, or that they can’t be trusted, or that they should enjoy fewer rights and privileges than you do. They are equal in the eyes of the law and should enjoy equal opportunity in the American marketplace.