All but directly defying Pope Francis‘s new approach and message of love and affirmation, Cardinal Timothy Dolan‘s United States Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to the U.S. Senate last week attacking ENDA. The USCCB then followed up yesterday with a press release reminding the Senate of its “serious concerns.”
The Bishops were very clear. Sort of.
“All people are created in the image and likeness of God and thus possess an innate human dignity that must be acknowledged and respected by other persons and by law,” the letter, signed by three of the Catholic Church’s notorious homophobes reads. “No one should be an object of scorn, hatred, or violence for any reason, including his or her sexual inclinations.”
Yes, discrimination is wrong — unless it’s against gay people, the Bishops essentially posit.
So, according to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ logic, this means that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act “does not justly advance the dignity of all workers and authentic non-discrimination,” because, God.
ENDA, apparently, the Bishops claim, “elevates ‘sexual orientation’ discrimination … to the same and, until now unique, level as race discrimination, and above religion, sex, and national origin discrimination.”
ENDA, apparently, contains too “vague” a “definition of ‘sexual orientation,'” that “would encompass sexual conduct outside of marriage, thus legally affirming and specially protecting that conduct.”
ENDA would “legally affirm and specially protect” adultery?
Who thinks like this?
ENDA, they claim, “could be used to punish as discrimination what many religions – including the Catholic religion – teach, particularly moral teaching about same-sex sexual conduct.”
It therefore, they claim, “threatens religious liberty.”
Except that ENDA does not apply to churches. (But maybe it’s about time that the religious right loses the right to — in the public square — tell gay people they’re going to hell?)
Of course, the worst part of all, ENDA “would be invoked by federal courts to support the claim that, as a matter of federal constitutional right, marriage must be redefined to include two persons of the same sex.”
God forbid.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on ENDA
//www.scribd.com/embeds/181765064/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&show_recommendations=true
Hat tip: Wonkette