The Court's decision & Catholicism

I am very happy to see that the Supreme Court has ruled that LGBTQ workers will be protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But the US Catholic church, where firing employees for being gay is a cottage industry, is *not* happy ...

[...] “I am deeply concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively redefined the legal meaning of ‘sex’ in our nation’s civil rights law,” the president of the Catholic bishops’ conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, said in a statement. “This is an injustice that will have implications in many areas of life.” “Protecting our neighbors from unjust discrimination does not require redefining human nature,” he said ... - Conservative Christians See ‘Seismic Implications’ in Supreme Court Ruling

Justice Gorsuch, in writing the opinion, pointed out that there is already a ministerial exception that allows the church to assert that school teachers are actually "ministers" and thus are excepted from legal protections against discrimination, and Gorsuch pointed out too that future cases could be brought on this subject.

I'm sure the US Bishops and their lawyers are already planning to challenge this case. Depressing that the church spends so much of its time and money trying to prop up a questionable teaching. Hypocritical too, considering the church is mainly run by gay men ... The Gay Church: Thousands of priests are closeted, and the Vatican’s failure to reckon with their sexuality has created a crisis for Catholicism.

It's important to remember that while the Catholic church is against the rights of LGBTQ people, most actual Catholics are not. Here's a bit from a press release about the Court's decision from Catholics For Choice ...

[T]he Catholic hierarchy, through its political arm, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has wed itself to the Trump administration in efforts to secure federal policies that broaden the ability to discriminate against women, LGBT people and those seeking reproductive healthcare. The USCCB’s amicus briefs in both these cases claim that protecting the LGBT community “would create serious burdens on religious liberty” and “could affect the ability of health care providers to perform services in accord with their professional judgment as well as their religious and moral convictions.”

The bishops decidedly un-Catholic attempts to impose their prejudices on the entire nation runs counter to the beliefs of a strong majority of Catholics, 74% of whom disagree with the use of our religion as a means to discriminate ...