Written: 12/31/2011
Last week, the Catholic Cardinal of Chicago (hey, he could be the CCC!), compared gays to the KKK.
You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.” he said on FOX Chicago Sunday.
This is completely disingenuous. No one was challenging the church’s “liberty.” Even though George himself has done everything he can to prevent legal equality for LGBTs, we have never in turn insisted that the church be forced to perform same-sex marriages, for example, any more than others have insisted that it be forced to perform marriages for divorcees.
Furthermore, apologies, in order to be real, need to be issued directly to those wronged. A web posting is about as passive a delivery of an apology as you can get. Cardinal George could have picked up the phone and called an LGBT journalist and had a genuine dialog about the issues. Moreover, his original slam against “the Gay Liberation Movement” sounded like it was directed at the Gay Liberation Network, which has led demonstrations against his support of discrimination on several occasions, and he could have delivered an apology to GLN.
After making his original comparison of gays to the KKK, he defended that statement on at least two subsequent occasions. George’s statement tonight indicates he erred in making it sound like he felt that “all gays” were like the KKK — the implication is that he apparently still thinks many gays are fascists.
Finally, George’s statement misses the genesis of how he got into this mess in the first place — the church leadership’s long-standing and aggressive opposition to all equal rights legislation for LGBT people. When the church leadership ceases doing everything it can to oppose our equal participation in society, then we might believe that George truly cares about our feelings.
