US Bishops Demand HUD Keeps Gays OUT
by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
The Roman Catholic Church wants you to believe that they are not bigots when it comes to lesbians, gays and trans people. Simply put, they love the sinner even if they hate the sin. Of course, their way of showing this is to turn around and try to deny lesbians and gays equal protections under the law. In fact, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is urging the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development to not protect lesbians and gay who use their programs. Their reason? They might have to actual help those icky lesbians and gays instead of leaving them to rot in the street.
The Roman Catholic Church wants you to believe that they are not bigots when it comes to lesbians, gays and trans people. Simply put, they love the sinner even if they hate the sin. Of course, their way of showing this is to turn around and try to deny lesbians and gays equal protections under the law. In fact, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is urging the Departmentof Housing and Urban Development to not protect lesbians and gay who use their programs. Their reason? They might have to actual help those icky lesbians and gays instead of leaving them to rot in the street.
The USCCB’s general counsel Anthony Picarello and their associate general counsel Michael Moses filed a comment with HUD that, according to the USCCB goes something like this:
[When] it comes to orientation and gender identity, “a protected classification for purposes of federal housing programs has no support in any Act of Congress and appears at odds with at least one other, namely, the Defense of Marriage Act.” They added that “the regulations may force faith-based and other organizations, as a condition of participating in HUD programs and in contravention of their religious beliefs, to facilitate shared housing arrangements between persons who are not joined in the legal union of one man and one woman.”“By this, we do not mean that any person should be denied housing. Making decisions about shared housing, however, is another matter,” wrote Picarello and Moses. “Particularly here, faith-based and other organizations should retain the freedom they have always had to make housing placements in a manner consistent with their religious beliefs, including when it concerns a cohabiting couple, be it an unmarried heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple. Given the very large role that faith-based organizations play in HUD programs, the regulation, by infringing upon that freedom, may have the ultimate effect of driving away organizations with a long and successful track record in meeting housing needs, leaving beneficiaries without the housing that they sought or that the government intended them to receive.”
OKAY, well, why not ask HUD to craft an exemption for your services rather than saying that such protections are wrong? That is part of the problem with the Catholic Church and the Evangelical churches who oppose homosexuality. Simply put, they claim that they are not opposed to lesbians, gays and transpeople, but the moment anything comes up to make a lesbian or gay man’s life a little easier, they pounce on it to try and stop it. What they show is that they have hearts that make the Grinch’s look positively huge- and that is when it was three times too small. They do not help out of a sense of kindness and charity, but rather out of duty and a need to make people like follow their religion. Simply put, they no longer believe in their faith, only in the money and power it can bring them.
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