I wish neither to be called an activist or a liberal. I wish to be a Christian. I would be content to attend Mass, make few waves, say very little, take out my teeth and sip my tea by eight o’clock. Only I cannot. This faith compels me to say and write things which I feel people should already know anyway.
On one side of the country the Catholic governor of New Jersey admits not only to having an adulterous affair, but an affair with another man. He speaks of all the pain and confusion he experienced growing up and how he has finally come to terms with his homosexuality, but is now resigning from office. On the other side, an order comes down in the state of California, that the four thousand plus gay marriages performed by the mayor of San Francisco are now invalid. And now it comes again to my attention that, out east, there are splits in my very own church over the ordination of our first openly gay bishop. Gene Robinson. Whole parishes have divided. Dioceses have formed divorcing themselves from the Episcopal Church.
But for all of these great matters happening far away it boils to what is before my eyes in South Bend.
For the first time in a long time I saw Dean in church (The Catholic one that was my old parish) on Sunday morning. Two years Dean mowed the lawn, kept the ground, cleaned the church, laid out the hosts, cleaned the chalices, led people to their seats, swept the porch, exhausted himself as a servant in that house. But I never saw him attend as a member of the parish and only last weekend did he come with his boyfriend. They ducked in and ducked out, careful to show little sign of affection for each other. As much as I—now not even Catholic—complain about the little welcome I find there, there was even less for Dean. I feel.
And now we come to the core of the issue. When, in the churches, we speak of gay rights we make it all very rhetorical. We keep it up in the air. We talk about gay people as if there were “out there”. But the gay people “out there” are not the ones we are concerned about. Not really. The only gay person who cares about what Orthodox Judaism has to say about homosexuality is a gay Jew. The only gay man who cares about how the Catholic Church treats gays is a gay Catholic. I am not talking about us taking a radical or an unbiblical stance toward homosexuals. No: I am saying that we must respect our brothers and sisters beside us in the pews who happen to be homosexuals. The spirit in most churches and mosques and shuls in one that shows little respect for a large segment of people beside us in the pews, behind us in the choirs or, for that matter, above us in the pulpit.
I have heard a lot of rhetoric spewed by conservatives about what God says about homosexuality. God says a great deal about a great many things, but I find very little in Scripture he said about gays. In fact, Jesus said nothing. And there are many people who like to say—my bus driver told me this—that God doesn’t like gay people, like gay things. Well, maybe God talks to them and tells them these things, I don’t know. All I know is that God does like a fair person, a just person, a heart full of charity and loving kindness that does not fear things different from himself.
I know this: In the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Christ gives a parable wherein he divides all mankind between goats and sheep. The goats receive condemnation and the sheep salvation and joy. The test for who is a goat and who is a sheep is not how much they tithed in the church basket on Sunday, or how good of a Baptist, Catholic or Anglican they were. What it boils down to is” When you saw the least of your brothers and sisters, did you treat them as if they were me? Because they were.”

Now I would ask this question to certain people: When you stand before God: and you will—we all will—and he asks you why you didn’t recognize him in people who were not the least, but, in many cases, the best of his brothers and sisters, and the only reason you chose not to recognize Him in them is because they were gay: in that hour, before God, what will you say?