"America has an agenda for homosexuals in Uganda," according to Pastor Joseph Serwadda, and accepting gay rights as human rights and human rights as gay rights "is going to be very tough on Africa."

"As Muslim societies wrestle with how to treat religious minorities, let them look to our nation," said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick this week in his congressional testimony on protecting the civil rights of American Muslims. Watch excerpts from the hearing.

There is debate and discussion going on within religious communities about rhetoric, teachings, tolerance and anti-gay sentiments in society.

A recent expansion of the federal hate crimes law "does not suspend the First Amendment," says New York Times staff writer David Kirkpatrick, "and there's nobody, I think, on either side of the US Senate or House of Representatives that intends to see preachers locked in jail."

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom, an Orthodox synagogue in Washington, participated in an interfaith vigil at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and his congregation's Torah study was dedicated to the memory of the museum security officer who was shot to death.