— State’s non-discrimination requirements “directly conflict with St. Mary’s, St. Bernadette’s, and the Archdiocese’s religious beliefs,” the lawsuit says.
The Denver Catholic Archdiocese along with two of its parishes is suing the state alleging their First Amendment rights are violated because their desire to exclude LGBTQ parents, staff and kids from Archdiocesan preschools keeps them from participating in Colorado’s new universal preschool program.
The program is intended to provide every child 15 hours per week of state-funded preschool in the year before they are eligible for kindergarten. To be eligible, though, schools must meet the state’s non-discrimination requirements.
The Denver Archdiocese, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood filed suit against Lisa Roy, executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, and Dawn Odean, director of Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program, on Wednesday.
The Denver Archdiocese and the Colorado Department of Early Childhood could not immediately be reached for comment.
“The Department is purporting to require all preschool providers to accept any applicant without regard to a student or family’s religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and to prohibit schools from “discriminat[ing] against any person” on the same bases,” the lawsuit said. “These requirements directly conflict with St. Mary’s, St. Bernadette’s, and the Archdiocese’s religious beliefs and their religious obligations as entities that carry out the Catholic Church’s mission of Catholic education in northern Colorado.”
The Denver Archdiocese said in the suit they do not believe adhering to their religious beliefs against accepting LGBTQ people qualifies as discrimination. The Denver Post published written guidance last year issued by the Denver Archdiocese to its Catholic schools on the handling of LGBTQ issues, including telling administrators not to enroll or re-enroll transgender or gender non-conforming students and explaining that gay parents should be treated differently than heterosexual couples.
The lawsuit said St. Mary’s and St. Bernadette’s each require their preschool staff sign annual Archdiocese-approved employment contracts affirming that staff abide by traditional Catholic teachings on life, sexuality and marriage. They require parents who send their kids to their preschools “to understand and accept the community’s worldview and convictions regarding Catholic moral issues like life, marriage, and human sexuality,” the lawsuit said.
The Denver Archdiocese argues in the lawsuit that the state has “cornered the market” for preschool services by providing universal funding and any preschool providers who don’t participate will be “severely disadvantaged” and forced to charge “significantly” higher fees, disadvantaging low-income families whose children attend Archdiocesan schools.
“Colorado did not have to create a universal preschool funding program, but in doing so it cannot implement that program in a way that excludes certain religious groups and providers based on their sincerely held religious beliefs,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said enrolling children with gay parents into an Archdiocesan school “is likely to lead to intractable conflicts” because a “Catholic school cannot treat a same-sex couple as a family equivalent to the natural family without compromising its mission and Catholic identity.”
The lawsuit is seeking a jury trial and for the state to reverse its decision and allow the Denver Archdiocese to participate in the universal preschool program while giving them the ability to exclude LGBTQ students, staff and parents from their schools.
A Catholic school near Kansas City, Mo., has expelled an A-student because his mother objected to a ban on LGBTQ+ books, according to a report.
The Kansas City Starreported that St. John LaLande Catholic School in Blue Springs disenrolled Hollee Muller’s 11-year-old son Hunter after “prayerful consideration.”
A July letter from the school said both parents “stated both verbally and in writing you do not agree with nor do you support the teachings of the Catholic Church. After prayerful consideration and discussion among our school administration it is obvious we no longer have a partnership with you, since the values of your family are not in alignment with those of our school. Therefore, the school administration has made the decision to disenroll your child from our school.”
But the Mullers are longtime and active members of the church. Muller’s husband Paul even attended the school as a child, the report stated.
Muller said the problem began when a new priest “came rolling in hot” and started banning books, including a book about a polar bear with two mothers.
“I don’t think being blatantly homophobic is a teaching of the Catholic Church,” Muller told the paper. The school also banned the Duolingo language app for translating words like “gay” and “lesbian.”
Another news source, CNN 10, was discontinued “because its parent company is too liberal,” one mom said.
“I don’t consider myself liberal, but banning books, and Duolingo? Don’t punish the child for the parent. And honestly, Hollee did nothing wrong,” she said.
School officials declined to comment, but a statement suggested the Mullers broke a “Family-School Covenant.”
“When a family challenges Catholic teaching and curriculum decisions through sustained complaints to the school and diocesan administration, irreconcilable differences can arise. In these situations, it is in the best interest of the family and the school to separate,” the statement said.
— In Ireland, Ms. O’Connor spoke out about abuse and the complicity of religious institutions. When she came to the United States, many were not ready to hear her — yet.
Sinead O’Connor shocked many Americans by tearing up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live, decades before a reckoning over abuse in the American Roman Catholic Church.
Americans began to grapple with a nationwide epidemic of child abuse in Catholic parishes and other religious organizations in 2002, after a landmark Boston Globe investigation revealed a pattern of misdeeds and cover-ups in Boston that went back decades.
Ten years earlier, Sinead O’Connor became a pop culture pariah in the United States for an on-air protest intended to raise awareness of the same problem.
The backlash to her actions — tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” and then shouting “Fight the real enemy!” — was swift.
Prominent Americans, including celebrities like Madonna and Joe Pesci, denounced her. Protesters brought a 30-ton steamroller to crush her cassettes in Rockefeller Center. Catholic leaders were outraged, including some who were forced to resign years later for their roles in covering up abuse.
Many people in America derided her as “somebody looking for attention,” said Cahir O’Doherty, the arts editor of The Irish Voice, an Irish diaspora newspaper in New York City. “It never occurred to anyone that maybe she had a point,” he added.
But back in Ms. O’Connor’s native Ireland, a reckoning over abuse in the church was already beginning.
“In America, she was very, very ahead of her time for doing that,” said Mr. O’Doherty. “She said ‘enough’ and the culture caught up with her.”
The death of Ms. O’Connor at 56, which was announced on Wednesday, was met with an outpouring of remembrances from around the world. But in Ireland and its diaspora communities, there was a more pointed grief at the loss of an artist many saw as both a symbol of and catalyst for a long-needed reckoning over abuse within the church.
On Wednesday, Catholics for Choice, an American group, called Ms. O’Connor a prophetic heroine “unafraid to demand justice for victims of clerical sexual abuse, challenge patriarchy, and speak truth to power — even when her voice was a lonely one and it cost her dearly to do so.”
In the Ireland of Ms. O’Connor’s youth, politics were dominated by the Catholic Church. For decades, priests at the parish level saw part of their role as protecting the community from sexual promiscuity, homosexuality and unwed mothers and their children.
To do so, they used an unwritten, extralegal power to send women accused of such sins to reform schools, workhouses and other facilities run by Catholic orders.
It was a world with which Ms. O’Connor was intimately familiar, and her experiences in one such facility as a teenager, after enduring years of abuse from her mother, set the stage for the moment on “Saturday Night Live.”
“She had already seen what happened to spirited girls and gay kids in Ireland, and to her it wasn’t an abstraction, it was her biography,” said Mr. O’Doherty, who grew up gay in rural Ireland and moved to the United States in 1996. “She came out of an era of silence that swallowed spirited girls and gay boys, that consumed Irish life, and that you could vanish into. And she nearly did.”
In interviews later in life, and in her 2021 memoir, Ms. O’Connor described her mother pinning her to the floor and pummeling her, while forcing her to say over and over again, “I am nothing.”
She grew into a rebellious teenager, skipping school and stealing. After she was caught shoplifting a pair of gold shoes to wear to a rock concert, a social worker suggested that a “rehabilitation center” might set her straight.
That is how, at the age of 14, Sinead O’Connor was sent to live at An Grianán Training Centre in Dublin, which was run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity. It had formerly been a Magdalene Laundry, a facility where a “fallen woman” might spend her entire life washing the dirty laundry of the surrounding community.
The facilities formed a nucleus of physical and sexual abuse in Ireland. A government report in 2009 said tens of thousands of children were abused in industrial schools alone, a staggering figure in a country with barely more than five million people. At one, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, the remains of hundreds of babies and fetuses were found in a septic tank in 2017.
An Grianán also housed older women who had been sent there in their youths. In interviews in later years, Ms. O’Connor, who lived there for two years, spoke of interacting with women who were there because they “had their babies taken off them, or because they were sexually abused and complained and nobody believed them.”
Ms. O’Connor said the younger women were kept separated from the older women, but sometimes as punishment the younger girls were sent to sleep in an infirmary wing. She called it “a secret hospice” where older women were sent before they died.
“There was no staff,” she recalled in a 2021 interview. “These ladies were calling out all night, ‘Nurse! Nurse!,’ and there was nobody to come.”
Ms. O’Connor described nights there as horrifying and panic-inducing, but also said she had come to feel “terribly, terribly lucky that god put me” in An Grianán “because otherwise those women, we would never have heard of them.”
The system of abuse had been normalized, spoken of only in hushed tones, in Ireland for decades, Ms. O’Connor said. “But I met them at their dying moment and saw them every day, the way they were treated.”
It was also at An Grianán, she said, that a nun gave her a guitar for the very first time.
By the time Ms. O’Connor became famous in the United States for her first album in 1987 — at the age of 21, just a few years out of An Grianán — the first rumbles of church accountability in her home country had begun. They would grow louder thanks in part to her willingness to describe her own life experiences.
She was a frequent presence at street protests and charity events for a range of social causes, including abortion rights, a procedure she publicly said she had undergone, and equal rights for people of color, migrants and L.G.B.T.Q. people. (Ms. O’Connor described herself as a lesbian in 2000 and as bisexual in 2005, but did not discuss the topic in later years.)
Ms. O’Connor, with her daughter Roisin, during an antiracism demonstration in Dublin.
But she became most associated with efforts to combat abuse within the Catholic Church, decades before the scale of the problem within American religious organizations — from the Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to the Hasidic dynasties of New York — became common knowledge.
One the church’s most high-profile and influential priests in the United States, Theodore E. McCarrick, was expelled from the church in 2019 and is facing sexual assault charges in two states, the first and only American cardinal to be criminally charged in connection with sex abuse.
Former Roman Catholic Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick at his arraignment on charges that he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old boy.
In her memoir, Ms. O’Connor wrote that the picture she tore in half on TV was not just any picture of the pope. It was a picture of the pope’s Mass in the Irish city of Drogheda in 1979, which he dedicated to “the young people of Ireland” and which had drawn 300,000 worshipers.
That same photograph had been the only decoration on her mother’s wall, she wrote, and had looked down on them both as her mother pinned her to the floor and beat her.
After her mother died in a car accident in 1985, she took the picture, determined to someday destroy it. To her it was an object that “represented lies and liars and abuse,” she wrote.
“The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother,” she wrote. “I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came.”
When she took the stage on Saturday Night Live to perform Bob Marley’s “War,” she meant to start a broader conversation, she later said. She even changed the lyrics to make it about the abuse of children. And she had her mother’s picture with her.
As she began to sing, she knew the moment had come.
When Joey Piscitelli was 14, he was sent to Silesian High School in Richmond, California. A self-described “runt”, he weighed 70 pounds and looked about 10. “I think that’s why I was picked,” he told me. He was befriended by the school’s vice principal, Father Stephen Wheelan, before being subjected to years of abuse. It began with priests masturbating in front of him and ended in violent rape. He is aware of at least four other victims of the paedophile ring at his school who have since committed suicide.
Piscitelli is now an advocate for other victims, having won $600,000 in compensation from a 2006 jury trial against the Diocese of Oakland — which last month declared bankruptcy, after receiving more than 330 legal claims of sexual abuse. It’s part of a growing trend in the Catholic Church of the United States, which Piscitelli and other campaigners believe is an attempt by the church to skirt its responsibilities — but the reality is not as clear-cut as it may seem.
Since ground-breaking reporting by The Boston Globe in 2002 exposed widespread sexual abuse in America’s Catholic Church — including the practice of moving known paedophile priests between parishes — countless victims have sought justice. Two years after the exposé was published, the United States Church commissioned a report, which found that, between 1950 and 2002, over 4,000 Catholic priests were the object of sexual abuse allegations. The cases involved some 11,000 children, the overwhelming majority of whom were young boys. The allegations go all the way to the top, with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked by the Pope in 2019, the subject of an ongoing criminal case. A seismic reckoning, but one that is still far from complete.
In California, a 2019 law opened a three-year window in which cases would be exempt from statutory limitation, resulting in more than 3,000 lawsuits. The influx of claims has seen at least four of the 12 Roman Catholic dioceses in California file for bankruptcy, or contemplate doing so, to deal with the crisis. In New York, five of the state’s eight dioceses have also recently sought bankruptcy protection.
In a letter to parishioners last month, Oakland Bishop Michael C. Barber said that the Diocese made the filing because it believed that the bankruptcy process is “the best way to support a compassionate and equitable outcome for survivors of abuse”, while ensuring that the church continues to support the community. He warned that the Diocese would be forced to close some of its worship sites, and “re-imagine” how to use others. This was part of the “dual challenge of declining engagement by Catholics”, he explained, citing a 25% decline in priests since 1985 and Mass attendance that has almost halved since 2010.
According to research firm Gallup, between 2000 and 2020 the percentage of self-described Catholics in the United States who were members of a church declined by 18 points (from 76% to 58%) — double the number of Protestants no longer going to church. While the decline in church attendance cannot be solely put down to child sexual abuse scandals — it is occurring to an extent across most Christian denominations, and has been accelerated by pandemic lockdowns — they may explain why it has been particularly precipitous for Catholics.
For those seeking financial redress for these horrific crimes, understanding the true wealth of the Catholic Church is a frustrating pursuit. One estimate suggests its total United States assets are worth $65 billion, but there is no way to prove this figure. Only through individual bankruptcy cases can churches’ true wealth be known. The Oakland Dioceses’ recent petition says that its assets are valued between $100 million and $500 million — and that liabilities from the claims against it are estimated to be in a similar dollar range.
When an organisation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, it automatically halts any pending civil lawsuits, while allowing the organisation, in this case the churches, to continue operating. Marie Reilly, a law professor at Penn State Law and practising Catholic, has compiled Chapter 11 bankruptcy data for The Catholic Project, which aims to provide transparency regarding the process. She noticed that filing for bankruptcy was becoming commonplace after the Diocese of Portland first sought the legal protection in 2004: 32 of the country’s 195 dioceses have sought it since. But Reilly believes that media coverage of the practice is often misleading.
“Lawyers for the plaintiffs, who are great at what they do, manage the media extremely well,” she told me. The Church, Reilly added, tends to be unwilling to “publicly push back on some of some of the inflammatory and colourful statements that are made by advocates for survivors of sexual abuse”. She believes that bankruptcy “is a very powerfully charged word” and public perception of it, along with legal complexities, makes the bankruptcy process “seem sinister in a way that in fact, it is not”.
A number of bankruptcy scholars, and lawyers who have no affiliation to the Church, have also come out in support of the bankruptcy strategy as the best way to handle mass sexual abuse claims. (The Boy Scouts of America, facing a similar crisis, is using the same mechanism). The reasoning goes that United States tort law could permit the first few claimants to take the lion’s share of compensation, meaning that subsequent victims could be left fighting for scraps. Reilly says that “the untold story about bankruptcy” is that it provides “an alternative to the winner-take-all race approach to litigation”. If all the claims against the church are resolved “in a single forum”, she says, all the victims “will be treated similarly”.
Victims, however, say that filing for bankruptcy shields the Catholic Church from true justice. Mike McDonnell, a child sexual abuse victim of the Church in Philadelphia and spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), says that bankruptcy proceedings stop the operations of the Church hierarchy coming to light. Many victims, he explained, are seeking to “unveil how some of these well-known predators within the diocese were allowed to continue their career by being transferred to parish after parish”. He believes that it is not only financial claims that are halted when a bankruptcy petition is filed, but also any deeper inquiries into the systemic cover-up of abuse. “The victim is then prevented from seeing documents that we know the diocese is holding on to,” he says. “We know that the Catholic Church is extremely good at keeping records and taking notes.”
There is only so much the national, and international, Church is willing to do. The Vatican wrote to the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2020, reminding them that dioceses filing for bankruptcy may require consent from the Holy See — when the “alienation of temporal goods” exceeds $7.5 million for dioceses with more than 500,000 members, and $3.5 million for those with smaller numbers. The overarching US Church body, meanwhile, has established a protocol for managing cases — each diocese is supposed to have its own designated Victim Assistance Coordinator, for instance — but it has eschewed responsibility for the financial management of claims. Chieko Noguchi, executive director of public affairs for the US Bishops’ Conference, told UnHerd in a statement that the “financial, legal, structural, and operational matters” of each United States diocese operates separately under the governance of its respective bishop. (She also said that the Church has “made much progress, but we also know that the painful experience of survivors calls us to continual improvement”.)
Marie Reilly agrees that victims deserve restitution, but says that their cause has been hijacked by class action lawyers who advertise on television and “generate a large number of claims” though communicating an “anti-church sentiment”. She suspects that some victims’ groups are funded by “well-organised, extremely sophisticated” donors looking for profit rather than justice.
On that front, she has a case. In 2017, former SNAP fundraiser Gretchen Rachel Hammond filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Network, alleging that she was fired for confronting the organisation about “colluding with survivors’ attorneys”. Hammond accused SNAP of exploiting victims, stating in her lawsuit that the organisation “routinely accepts financial kickbacks from attorneys in the form of ‘donations’”, and it then “refers survivors as potential clients to attorneys, who then file lawsuits on behalf of the survivors against the Catholic Church.” Mike McDonnell told UnHerd that SNAP will not comment on “that resolved issue”.
Church bankruptcy is the real issue, he says, that needs to be addressed. “It’s not fair, because it still allows the dioceses to steer the proceedings and have a better outcome,” he says. Victims need significant compensation. But the days of “large six figure settlements” for survivors are becoming increasingly rare. “If you really tally up the cost of trauma over the course of an individual’s lifetime, it’s a heck of a lot more than $175,000”, which he says is now roughly the average payout. McDonnell believes that, by refusing to take financial responsibility for that trauma, the Catholic Church is kicking the can down the road, and “revictimising those who have been terribly hard done by”.
Many have pointed to the vast property holdings of the Church as another sign that filing for bankruptcy is a shady tactic. But some dioceses have actually started selling property to contribute to settlements. In 2021, Long Island in New York sold its headquarters for $5.2 million. Last year, the Archdiocese of New Orleans sought court approval to sell off properties as part of its bankruptcy case. So far, it has only sold one former school for $1.9 million — a drop in the ocean of the $243 million in assets, and $139 million in liabilities, that it listed in its bankruptcy petition. (Marie Reilly notes that the Diocese has “layers of financial problems” beyond sexual abuse cases).
And while the Catholic institution’s unpopularity balloons, it appears that an equally despised, albeit secular villain is entering the arena. Reilly says that insurance companies have become increasingly involved in this scandal, on behalf of the Church, and that they are resisting victims’ claims in court. Historical lawsuits without witnesses are notoriously difficult to prosecute, and insurers are beginning to mount more robust legal defences. “Insurers are saying, ‘the dioceses won’t push back, so we’re going to push back — we’re not just going to write the checks anymore’”, she says. This is another way in which bankrupt churches might serve victims better: under bankruptcy law, claims are “batch processed”, with few going to jury trial — a process that is not only traumatic for victims, but also has a less predictable outcome.
Pope Francis has asked victims of clerical sexual abuse for forgiveness, but SNAP says it is up to individuals, and not something that can be granted to the institution. These cases are about redressing failure, and everyone — even insurance companies — recognises that nothing in this world can ever truly compensate for the moral, psychological and spiritual injuries inflicted on untold numbers of young children by an institution that was supposed to love them.
For survivors like Joey Piscitelli, the Church’s request for grace is a step too far. And nothing will persuade him that the legal manoeuvring is not a false pretence to keep perpetrators’ names, and details of their crimes, out of the media. “A bankruptcy court shouldn’t have jurisdiction over the information of what priests did to kids,” he says. “By filing for bankruptcy because they’re being pursued for tens of millions of dollars, Catholic Churches are claiming that they are the victims.”
Inside the church on this June evening in Georgetown, Joseph Chee finally felt welcome.
“Let us build a house where love can dwell. And all can safely live,” he sang, alongside dozens of parishioners gathered to celebrate Christ’s love during Pride month.
Chee, who went to Catholic school, who studied Carmelite theology, who belonged to conservative political groups and who knew for a good part of his 30 years that he was gay, had spent years searching for his place in the world and in a church that didn’t seem to want him.
“I felt very alienated from all the communities that I had,” he said. “I felt deeply convinced that I wasn’t supposed to leave the church, you know? But I was like, ‘Where is my place?’”
But under the leadership of Pope Francis, who last year publicly rejected judgment of gay people, Chee sensed an opening.
Joseph Chee, 30, found a home at Holy Trinity Catholic Church after years of feeling out of place as a gay, Catholic man.
Outside, a small band of protesters, upset that Holy Trinity Catholic Church dared hold a Pride Mass, had gathered to remind him of all he had overcome.
Waving red, crusader-style banners emblazoned with a golden lion and wearing lion brooches and sashes of the same, lipstick red, protesters proclaimed that the worshipers and every rainbow flag flying in America this month were unwelcome and part of a “battle against the powers of hell.”
“A coup occurred virtually overnight, with no guns fired, no bombs dropped, no biological warfare unleashed, even within the most conservative and political and military circles,” Doug Mainwaring, who once lived openly as a gay man and championed same-sex relationships, said into a speaker aimed at the attendees, who were protected by a police patrol. “The speed of the capitulation has been stunning.”
What’s really stunning is this virulent and strident backlash against Pride celebrations across the nation this month, where a small, vocal and cunningly strategic group is orchestrating a summer of hate. Haters have shut down similar church services in Pennsylvania and Michigan and orchestrated boycotts of Bud Light, Pride-themed Target products and even the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Conservative groups were emboldened by a June 1 tweet from the U.S. Conference of Bishops that they took as a call to action against pride celebrations in June: “Join us in honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus this June, a time to deepen our devotion to His endless love and mercy. Let us open our hearts to receive His grace and share His message of hope with the world.”
The church’s relationship with the LGBTQ community is complex, but Pope Francis at a news conference last year said that gay people “should not be marginalized because of this, but that they must be integrated into society.”
Pope Francis releases a dove as a symbol of peace at a Catholic Church in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Sept. 30, 2016. The pope said last year that gay people “must be integrated into society.”
D.C. is home to a parish where Chee and dozens of folks like him have found their place, where an LGBTQIA+ ministry has thrived and reconnected Washington lawyers, doctors, students, congressional staff members with the church of their childhood, the church many of them felt had rejected them.
The ministry was founded thanks to “a commitment by the Jesuit order to make sure that the spiritual needs of all marginalized community are being met,” said Ernie Raskauskas, 71, who has been a Holy Trinity parishioner for decades.
He went to Gonzaga College High School, Holy Cross College, Catholic University. He’s got the Catholic bona fides. In Georgetown, he finally found a place to be Catholic and gay after the Jesuits “decided that the LGBTQIA communities were very marginalized, that our spiritual needs weren’t being met, and that they were going to make a special effort on this.”
The parishioners are all deeply Catholic and found a place at Holy Trinity — and nearly everyone I spoke with said this explicitly — where they can be fully themselves.
“It may be difficult to be queer in Catholic spaces,” said Cerissa Cafasso, 40. “But it can also be a challenge to be Catholic in progressive spaces.”
She’s a lawyer and bisexual and never gave up on practicing Catholicism, but wasn’t totally comfortable until she came to Holy Trinity. “I can be myself, my full person, with no throat clearing.”
During the Mass, the faint sound of drums and bagpipes could be heard coming in from outside between the hymn’s verses.
The protesters were with an ultraconservative group based in Pennsylvania called America Needs Fatima. They organize Rosary Rallies around events that frighten them, like Pride parades and church services that openly embrace marginalized communities.
Doug Mainwaring speaks outside Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, protesting their third-annual Pride Mass.
Less than two dozen of them did all this on Wednesday, trying to disrupt the third-annual Pride Mass at President Biden’s church, something they ignored the past two years (which coincidently wasn’t close to an election).
They achieved little, beyond surprising the neighbors.
“Seriously? That’s so sad,” said a 19-year-old Georgetown University student who was shocked to see the protest on her street. “And it’s weird this is happening today.”
Really weird. Especially right after Pride Fest on Sunday where sponsorship tables included Washington Gas, Wegmans, the U.S. Census, Lockheed-Martin andthe CIA, among others. These entities — and hundreds more — recognize that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex or asexual is normal, boring even.
The backlash is fueled by folks who had little to say about Pride a year ago, but are now reacting to grievances and fears being broadcast by conservatives, by an unprecedented raft of anti-LGBTQ legislation sweeping statehouses. It’s so profound, the Human Rights Campaign issued its first-ever “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.”
“It’s ridiculous,” said a gay man who traveled about five hours to walk up those steps of Holy Trinity, to sit in a pew and to — finally — exhale.
He’s in his 30s, lives in a conservative town in Pennsylvania, works at very conservative organization and is only out to his family. He asked me several times to preserve his anonymity in our interview.
Deeply Catholic, he kept trying to go to church, knowing what he knows about himself, about what those in the pews next to him think of him. “I wouldn’t feel welcome,” he said.
Ever since he accidentally found Holy Trinity’s online Mass during the pandemic (he said his mouse bumped a tab and opened the link, he called it a “God sighting”) he’s been attending their services, online, then in person, making that drive. Five hours each way, as often as he can.
His mom came with him on Wednesday, and they knelt together.
