WHEN are we Catholics going to stop harping on/slamming/despising gay people?

During a recent Mass in the Diocese of Fresno, I was asked to sign up for the Catholic Legislative Network. I was in complete agreement with the pitch: defense of the sanctity and dignity of life, from conception to natural death (although I was surprised that the death penalty was not included in the list of wrongs against human life). But then the issue of same-sex marriage had to be thrown into the mix, and I could no longer in good conscience join this network.

WHY have same-sex unions been lumped into things that attack the sanctity of human life? Gays who wish to commit themselves to each other for life do not cause anyone to die. A gay marriage does not take a life, as do the practices of abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. I am not talking about the Catholic sacrament of marriage, but the civil contract of marriage, which is properly a civil right, and which we Catholics have no business agitating for legislation against.

WHY do we not stick to the issues of life and death? And if not, why aren’t we then including artificial birth control, or in vitro fertilization treatments, or premarital sex, along with same-sex marriage, as things we must call for state legislation against?  We gloss over a host of sticky sexuality subjects, and then we single out one group of God’s children for repeated condemnation.

I am the Catholic parent of an adult gay child, and I am running out of excuses for our church’s behavior. My lesbian daughter does not believe us when we sing “All are Welcome in this Place”, because her lived experience is that she is not. And after the Catholic Legislative Network pitch, how can I argue with her? At that same Mass, we sang this song:

    “Do not be afraid, I am with you
    I have called you each by name
    Come and follow me
    I will lead you home –
    I love you and you are mine . . . “

To which our church now implicitly adds:
    “(Unless you are gay . . . “)

God forgive me, I was actually happy (for once) that my daughter had not attended Mass with me.

Valerie Schultz

Valerie Schultz is a freelance writer, a columnist for The Bakersfield Californian and the author of Till the Moon Be No More: The Grit and Grace of Growing Older. She lives on the Oregon Coast.