The Catholic Church Knows No Depths in Fighting Against LGBT Rights

by Michael Jones · 2009-09-02 16:29:00 UTC
Topics:

Archbishop Donald Wuerl

Seriously, if it wasn't for their efforts to advocate discrimination against gays and lesbians, I'm not sure what the Catholic Church would be doing nowadays.

We've got efforts by the Catholic Church in Maine to spend boatloads of money taking away civil rights from gays and lesbians, despite the fact that the Church is closing parishes.  We've got Catholic bishops in New Jersey saying that gay people are a threat to the public good. And now we've got the Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Donald Wuerl, circulating a letter to 300 local priests telling them that LGBT people and same-sex marriage pose a danger to children and families.

Archbishop Wuerl wants D.C. to put the question of same-sex marriage on a ballot, so that voters can decide whether gays and lesbians ought to have equal rights.  There's some of that good-ole religious compassion for ya'.  According to Wuerl, only straight people getting hitched can provide the type of loving relationships that keep families and children stable.

To that, here's a big cry of bullshit.  Why?  Because as Massachusetts has shown in their state, gay marriage has simply no detrimental impact on marriage or the family.  In fact, five years after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage, the state has some of the lowest divorce rates.  And by low, we mean as low as they were 80 freakin' years ago.

You'd think the Church would stop for a moment and recognize that.  Or you'd think the Church would look up from it's navel and see that in Washington, D.C., one out of three children live in poverty; the District has some of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the country; or that high school graduation rates in some areas of Washington stagger around the 55-60 percent mark.  Surely those issues have to be more important that whether gays and lesbians have the right to marry, right?

Not if your faith runs as hollow as Archbishop Wuerl's.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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