Many people have great passions in life, but without don't feeling the need to engage in display behaviour to let everyone know how terribly passionate they are.
Also, by disparaging rational thinking you fail to understand the "many paths" concept to growth. Abrahamics take the emotional path. Fakirs and martyrs take the path of suffering. Others follow transcendent experience. Others take the path of the mind. They are all just ways of interrogating and connecting with reality in the process of developing.
Ultimately people gotta do what people gotta do and IMO the kindest thing is to get out of their way and let do as they must, as long as they aren't wrecking the joint.
Of course sexuality is not a meme. Our impulses and tendencies will influence the memes we focus on, but they are not memes in and of themselves. Memes are just ideas that spread, like religions, just as traits spread genetically. There's a fair bit of "cross pollination" between genes and memes these days, though, because the jungle we live in largely consists of human opinions, memes - an abstract layer overlaying our physical realities.
BTW all poor old Dawkins did was respond in kind to creationists. He had been under constant attack for simply doing his job - researching and writing about evolutionary biology. Ultimately, he was alarmed at the idea of creationism being brought into science classes and a retreat into superstition, as described by Sagan:
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
THAT was the concern that Dawkins, Hitch and others tried to address. To suggest they are worse friends to gay people than theists is backwards. They are the kinds of people who would try to stop theists from stoning you.
I'm not an atheist (or a typical non-theist) but I will grant you that I see planets and stars as gods. The more I learn about them, the more incredible they are to me in their beauty, power, complexity and dynamism, especially the Earth, which is simply astonishing. All we can do is wonder what it will force humanity to do next in this metamorphosis.
However, I'm unusual in that Mum was very religious, so I was conditioned to believe in gods from childhood. Once you are conditioned, it's not a matter of believing in God or not. It's more a matter of who or what will act as your God (or gods) within the conditioned God placeholder in your mind. It's just a model, a filter through which we can interpret reality.
Once a child's mind is sculpted around the God meme, then they will find themselves treating their most revered thing as a god whether they notice it in themselves or not. For a fair while I was a bit of a pantheist, rather Spinozan, but I can't see the universe as God. It's too big. Too remote. Most of it has precious little to do with me.
So my conditioned emotional attachment is centred more on the Earth and the Sun. Given that the Sun comprises 99.98% of the solar system, there is a fair argument to be made that all of the planets are actually part of the Sun (that the Sun comprises more than just its nucleus, so to speak). This view ultimately manifests as love for the Earth and non-human nature. Ok, I love humans too, but in the same way as I love volcanoes, cliffs, clouds, the ocean and other dangerous things that are best admired at a distance
