We Shall All Be Healed (part four)
I also considered naming each of the chapters after a different Hot Mulligan song since they’re from Lansing.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four (you are here)
Part Five
Regular readers of G.O.T.H.S., who are uniformly brilliant and also attractive, will remember that earlier this year, I took a look at a 2022 letter that Bishops Robert Barron and Timothy Dolan, who are neither especially brilliant nor at all attractive, had written to Congress. In it, the bishops, men who had for many years billed themselves as the ultimate Marriage Respecters, attempted to persuade Congress to vote down the “Respect for Marriage Act”. The bishops’ concern was that if the government recognized same-sex marriage for purposes of funding and administering social services, Catholic organizations could be forced to do horrifying things like provide housing assistance or spousal health care benefits to gay people. The implication - really less of an implication and more of a statement, I guess - was that it was very important to the bishops that gay people not receive any aid from any Catholic organ, ever, and that this was so important to the bishops that they wrote a letter to Congress instead of doing nothing. If the choice was between a gay couple having to be unhoused, or a Catholic organization doing some legwork to find that gay couple a path to stable housing, the bishops believed that the first one was preferable, and believed it so strongly that they wanted the law to reflect it. At the time, I said that this - and please excuse the use of some dense legalese here - “seems extremely bad” . The reason I chose to use such strong albeit technical language is that the bishops, a influential group in the Catholic church, were voicing opposition to a policy with a laughably anodyne name, because of their own prejudice, in a way that would have material consequences for vulnerable people. People would be denied housing and other material aid because of this position from the bishops.
What I didn’t realize at the time, although I definitely should have, is that this sort of thing happens all of the time. Looking at the past several years, the bishops have gone out of their way to oppose social safety net legislation if any of the proposed material support would in any way to queer Americans, multiple times, expressing laughably horrifying opposition to bills with laughably anodyne names. As we’ll see, there are multiple recent examples of the bishops opposing important social service funding so much that they oppose programs being authorized or funded at all if queer Americans could possibly benefit from them. “If gay couples get included in the Violence Against Women Act, then nobody should have a Violence Against Women Act” is perhaps the least insane paraphrase of a stated USCCB policy that we’ll look at today.
That a Catholic organization would be the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a ban on conversion therapy for minors, a practice that receives condemnation from across the medical practice and demonstrably increases suicidal behavior among queer youth, is thus unsurprising. Catholic Charities, though, is not the USCCB, and their relationship with the USCCB has always been kind of complex because Catholic Charities is a non-monolithic patchwork of local organizations run by different local groups; the USCCB has some control over resource and funding allocation, and certainly provides member organizations with guidelines on how to serve others in a way that is compliant with Catholic moral teaching, but the range of the work and the variety of charitable organizations is too broad to manage centrally.
That said, Catholic Charities does this kind of shit all of the time, too.
Starting with the Violence Against Women Act: the USCCB, in a 2013 letter signed by bishops Blaire, Cordileone, Rhoades, Lori, and Gomez - all of them are still active and often outspoken bishops except for the now-deceased Blaire - explained:
“We cannot support the version of the “Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013” passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate (S. 47) because of certain language it contains. Among our concerns are those provisions in S. 47 that refer to “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” All persons must be protected from violence, but codifying the classifications “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as contained in S. 47 is problematic. These two classifications are unnecessary to establish the just protections due to all persons. They undermine the meaning and importance of sexual difference.”
Seems stupid, but at least they included the line “all persons must be protected from violence”, which I suppose is a high-water mark for meaningless statements the bishops have made to try and explain that they don’t hate gay or trans people. Amazingly, though, there’s something even more egregious in the same letter: the bishops opposed a separate measure in the same bill because it reauthorized the - look, I know legislators just make up these names, but still, imagine being a Catholic bishop and writing a public letter expressing strong opposition to a bill with this name - Trafficking Victims Protection Act:
“The Senate’s decision to incorporate into S. 47 a title reauthorizing the Trafficking Victims Protection Act also raises concerns because this title omits language to protect the conscience rights of faith-based service providers to victims of human trafficking. We strongly supported efforts to include such provisions. Conscience protections are needed in this legislation to ensure that these service providers are not required to violate their bona fide religious beliefs as a condition for serving the need.”
What is the right way to parse this statement? Because it’s difficult for me to understand this in any way other than “look, we want to help victims of human trafficking, but there are some victims that…we’re not gonna want to help.” It would be incorrect to say that the USCCB had taken a controversial-yet-brave stance simultaneously in favor of Violence Against Women and opposed to Trafficking Victims Protection, but it wouldn’t be ridiculous to say that. And as with the above example of the Respect for Marriage Act, the message is “this program to help the needy shouldn’t exist if we’re not able to turn away people for whatever reasons we want”. Bishops voiced similar opposition in 2013 to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; if they couldn’t discriminate, then there shouldn’t be any non-discrimination protections, period, despite some lip service early in the letter to the importance of protecting workers. Of course workers deserve protection from discrimination. Just not workers against whom we would like to discriminate.
One of the more horrifying, and more recent, examples of the bishops political lobbying was their (unsuccessful) attempt to stop the creation of the 988 national suicide prevention hotline, for the same reasons. Queer people could benefit from it, and were likely to benefit from it given their higher risk of suicide. The bishops’ response? Maybe nobody should have a suicide hotline after all. The gays can kill themselves all they want, and if some straights kill themselves as well? Well, that's a cost the bishops were willing to take on in order to make Christ known, loved, and served.
Catholic Charities, again, is not a unified national organization but a wide array of different local organizations. As a result, they tend to be more involved with state- and local-level matters than federal legislation; obviously, that’s part of what’s happening in Catholic Charities v. Whitmer. Even on a single issue, different branches of Catholic Charities take different positions and approaches, which can in turn be different from the stated position of the USCCB. But many of these chapters and organizations have similarly strong opinions on gay and transgender people as the USCCB, and a similar willingness to just gut service completely if there’s a chance that queer Americans could benefit from that service. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, as gay marriage became legal in an increasing number of states and eventually across the country, various adoption and foster care member agencies of Catholic Charities decided that it would just be best if it stopped helping all children needing adoption or foster care, to avoid icky gay couples possibly becoming parents. It happened in Boston in 2006, and Washington DC in 2010, and Rockford, IL in 2011, and the rest of Illinois later in 2011,
In that 2022 letter to Congress that I referenced at the beginning of this piece, Barron and Dolan wrote that “Our opposition to [the Respect for Marriage Act] by no means condones any hostility toward anyone who experiences same-sex attraction. Catholic teaching on marriage is inseparable from Catholic teaching on the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. To attack one is to attack the other. Congress must have the courage to defend both.” I’m starting to think that the Catholic church does not have the courage to defend the inherent dignity and worth of every human being. In fact, I’m starting to think that they are dedicated to attacking it.
Also earlier this year, as you brilliant and attractive readers all know, I wrote a piece that was very critical of the decision by Saint Mary’s College to reverse their earlier decision to include gender identity in their non-discrimination policy, due to backlash from conservative donors and a bishop named (ugh) Kevin. That piece was deliberately profane and over-the-top, because actively announcing that you were back to discriminating against people whose gender presentation the institution did not approve of was absurd. It was absurd because every other Catholic women’s college had somehow figured out how to do this without society collapsing, and it was absurd because it was impossible to enforce. And I made a lot of jokes about how impossible it was to enforce, but deep down, I don’t really believe that Saint Mary’s has any plan to enforce this policy at all. I don’t think the purpose of changing the non-discrimination policy back was to re-impose the college’s original mechanisms for enforcing gender presentation. I think it was to communicate to women who may have not conformed to traditional ideas of gender presentation. And I think the message that they wanted to communicate was “you are not welcome here”. And I think that’s a message that Catholic bishops and Catholic organizations, like this Michigan chapter of Catholic Charities, want to send all of the time. You are not welcome here. We do not want you in our community. We do not want you in our world. We do not want you in our schools. We do not want you in our buildings, or adopting children, or talking to a counselor that cares about who you are. We want you to be invisible and ignored by everyone, and if you don’t like it, you are more than welcome to kill yourselves.
Here is Daniel Walden, writing in 2022 for Outreach:
“Children in the United States are routinely refused adequate lunch in school because their parents cannot afford to pay for it. We continue to have a crisis of youth homelessness, a crisis that is particularly acute for queer youth, 28 percent of whom have experienced homelessness. We also continue to vote, on the community level, against building homeless shelters of all kinds, including for young people…It is strange, then, that so much Christian activism in this country should be focused on depriving children of precisely these things and thus on trying to kill them. Children who may be LGBTQ, and in particular, children who may be trans, are a special focus for this murderous impulse in our culture…the community excludes a particular sort of person, and to the extent that you have a relationship with that sort of person, you are not part of the community. Far worse, if you happen to be that sort of person—if you happen to be a queer person—because then you are excluded in toto. Children take this kind of exclusion seriously…We do intend total exclusion by these bans, for we intend that a queer child not be known as such, not be related to as such. We intend for them to believe that honesty and a fully human life are antithetical to each other.”
As with another time I quoted a Walden piece, I really just want to paste in the entire piece and maybe you should just go read the whole thing. Important organizations in our church, including the church’s clerical leadership, are actively pushing a culture - and corresponding policies - of exclusion. Which is not just a culture of death, but a culture of murder, murder of a very vulnerable and marginalized population, and murder of children, which, if I’m to believe everything the Catholic church tells me, is something that Catholics frown upon. “This is a lawsuit about helping children who experience distress over their biological sex.” Fuck you. You know better than that.
If there is one silver lining that I can offer from the Catholic Charities v. Whitmer case and what it means: the church isn’t, technically, spending your money to bring this case to court. They’re spending Kevin Hasson’s money. It’s always a Kevin.