When you are a child, you are taught that there are certain truths in life not to be questioned. For me, one of the concepts I didn’t think that I had any choice in was my religious affiliation.
Ever since I could remember, the influences around me have imposed Catholicism on my life. As a kid, not a weekend would pass when I would not get dressed up in my Sunday bests and go to church.
When I was in middle school and moved from the sunny desert of Arizona to the Queen City of Charlotte, I enrolled in Catholic school. Prior to my entrance into the Catholic school environment, I hadn’t really questioned the words that had been told to me all those years prior.
But then things began to shift, and all of a sudden, the aspects that I was always taught to believe in became a fuzzy unknown mostly because of one person.
While I was in middle school, I befriended a boy named Dean. As time passed and we began maturing into adults, he informed me that he was gay, and therefore he suddenly became the first and only person that I knew to be gay.
Despite the fact that his sexuality may have only been something that I had heard about in reruns of Will and Grace, I never once saw him as anything different than the person that I had grown close to over the years. His sexuality did not become a label to me. However, that label did cause me to think again when I would be sitting in religion class learning about the teachings of the Catholic Church.
From time to time, teachers would lecture about religion from the very traditional readings of the Bible to the modern day applications of morals. While most would believe that these two topics would logically relate, I could not help but see the disconnect. How is it possible that throughout the Scriptures, we are told to believe that Jesus loved and cared for everyone, yet in the world in which we live, many religious leaders often treat homosexuals as social pariahs who should be condemned for their lifestyle decisions? These thoughts quickly made me sick to my stomach.
As we got older, the opposition to the homosexual lifestyle became even more apparent, specifically in regards to marriage. In recent years, the Catholic Church has seemed to make it one of their missions to preserve the current definition of marriage. While I understand that religion is based on tradition, I wonder if the Church considers how its disapproval alienates a large majority of the population.
Moreover, during just this past election, reports claim that the Roman Catholic Church leadership spent almost $2 million to fight against marriage equality. So in my opinion, not only is the Church’s tendency to favor traditional practices discriminatory, but it is also rather costly – especially when considering other organizations which could have possibly benefitted from a portion of that financial aid.
Although I believe that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, I cannot seem to shake the feeling of animosity I have when I think of the hypocrisy here. As a kid, I was taught to love everyone the way that Jesus did, yet as an adult I see that these sentiments of love may be misplaced when the organization tries so desperately to ban the expression of love itself, when whom someone marries should not be their prime concern.
