After the massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando last year, only a few Catholic bishops expressed their sympathy or reached out to the LGBT community, and even fewer used the words "LGBT" or "gay" in their statements. That was revelatory to me. Even in death, LGBT people are largely invisible in the church. [...]
He is absolutely right. That doesn't mean that church teaching caused the shooting, but the ways in which religious leaders speak about the LGBT community influences the way the culture at large talks about them. Oftentimes it can give people cover for simply being homophobic, and they can use church teaching as a mask for their homophobia. [...]
You could make the "scandal" case about a whole raft of people: people who are divorced; people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment; women who have given birth to, or men who have fathered, a child out of wedlock; an unmarried couple who are living together. All these things are very public and we chose not to thunder over them. That, to me, is classic discrimination. Either you require everyone to adhere to church teaching -- on everything, not just sexual morality -- or not. But you don't put one person's life under a moral microscope simply because they are LGBT.
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