Being both an activist and a news junkie, I check more news websites, belong to more LGBT listservs, and subscribe to more email news aggregators and digests than any normal human being should. When I start my work day every morning, the very first thing I do is check these sources and social media to see what I may have missed on the previous day or overnight. Sometimes it isn’t much, once in awhile it’s something major, and other times certain headlines or stories just jump out at me.
This morning, it was a headline from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that caught my eye:
Gay marriage [sic] “simply can’t happen” — Catholic pastor.
The article (which you can read here) profiles Rev. Kurt Nagel, the pastor of Holy Family Parish in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland. Unlike several other priests in the Seattle archdiocese whose parishes have opted out of Archbishop Peter Sartain’s anti-same-sex marriage campaign, Nagel told churchgoers in a homily last Sunday that his parish would participate, agreeing to collect signatures to try and force a referendum on Washington’s marriage equality law because, in his words, “Gay MARRIAGE [sic] is simply not possible. . . [it] is not evil. It simply can’t happen at all.”
Here’s what I have to say to that:
Impossible? Can’t happen? Check the ring, dude.
Sorry Kurt, but you’re talking to a world that no longer exists. Marriage equality is a fact of life. You can try to deny it or pray it away until you’re blue in the face, but no amount of denial, wishing, or praying will be able to erase my marriage (six years and counting, baby) or the hundreds of thousands of other loving marriages between same-sex couples around the world. You’ve even lost your fellow Catholics — 71% of them support marriage equality, and that number is growing. So by all means, continue your divisive, mean-spirited, misguided spiritual bullying campaign against LGBT people. Just know that by choosing to do so, you’re hastening your own irrelevance.
