Nondiscrimination
I wasn’t going to call him back. I got the message off our church’s answering machine: “I want to ask you some questions,” the caller said, and he left his name and number. But I wasn’t going to call him back. Frankly, I was afraid. I was afraid the caller would be belligerent, combative, wanting…
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On January 14, 2016 a New York appeals court ruled that an upstate farm that rents out its premises for weddings illegally discriminated against a same-sex couple when it refused to host their wedding ceremony. The court rejected the farm’s claim that the owners’ religious beliefs exempted them from New York’s long-standing equality law. Melisa…
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Employment non-discrimination protections for LGBT people are among the final obstacles to full legal equality in the United States. Such legislation is hotly disputed locally, while federal action has stalemated until at least after the 2016 elections. Below are three recent news stories about Catholic involvement in LGBT nondiscrimination issues. Two of these stories highlight…
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“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8 Do we really believe that scripture? I believe this verse would serve us well to consider in its literal…
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Ireland’s lawmakers ended the country’s “Year of Equality” by passing a bill that will ban discrimination by religious institutions against LGBT employees. Gay Star News explained this latest development: The bill amends Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act, which allows schools and hospitals to ‘takes action’ to prevent employees from ‘undermining the religious ethos…
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In the coming year, we expect to see more than 100 anti-LGBTQ religious refusal laws proposed across the country. These laws come in many forms, but they all have the same goal—to use religion as an excuse to discriminate against and harm others. The good news is we’re a community committed to opposing such harmful…
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For the past week, my newsfeed on Facebook has been filled with posts and comments about the arrest of Kim Davis, the court clerk from Kentucky who was imprisoned on Thursday for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in her county, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling for equality and direct orders from a judge to resume…
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A Catholic elementary school educator in the Philadelphia area has been fired because she legally married another woman in 2007. This first-known firing case since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage equality across the nation has an unusual religious exemption twist to it. Philly.com reported that Nell Stetser, the principal of Waldron Mercy Academy in Merion, a Philadelphia suburb,…
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For some time now, my spouse and I have been bickering over where we should live in our retirement years. She, being a child from the South, and me, being from the North, well, we have our tensions. I have jokingly dubbed them our “Mason-Dixon line feud.” We are not stretching our imaginations much when…
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You know the old joke about praying for God’s help? The one where the man in a storm waits atop his roof while flood waters rise, having prayed for God’s help for deliverance? Meanwhile, his neighbor drives off, a boat passes by and even a rescue helicopter hovers overhead. All of which the man refuses…
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