The Catholic Church, through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is actively opposing the Equality Act, a federal bill that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights nondiscrimination law.
It lobbied against a national suicide hotline bill because the bill also funded LGBTQ-specific crisis support.
It filed briefs supporting Colorado’s conversion-therapy ban being struck down, and supporting a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for trans minors.
It backs the Conscience Protection Act, the same legal mechanism that has let hospitals cancel scheduled surgeries for transgender patients and pharmacists refuse to fill valid prescriptions.
All this based on “morality.”
By the same institution’s own numbers, at any given time, roughly half of its priests are not celibate. That figure comes from A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who studied roughly 1,500 priests over 25 years. Out of roughly 37,000 priests currently serving in the United States, that’s on the order of 18,500 men.
An institution whose own clergy cannot uniformly keep the vow they took is lobbying to strip other people of medical care and legal protection over private conduct that harms no one. That is not a moral position. It is a double standard with a legislative budget.
Religious liberty protects the right to practice a faith without the state interfering. It has never meant the right to withhold someone else’s medical care.
Nobody is asking these bishops to change their beliefs. Yet they are asking for a veto over other people’s healthcare, and they are getting it, one bill and one court case at a time.
