I am writing to express my appreciation of and support for the anti-discrimination ordinance before the Juneau Assembly. I am also writing to express my bafflement at the position of our local Catholic diocese, which is opposed to the ordinance.
Raised a Christian in the Lutheran Church I, as many young people do, turned away gradually in my late teens and then abruptly in my mid-twenties. The breaking point for me was a hellfire and brimstone sermon at a funeral for a dear friend who was an avowed atheist — and the priest knew that, as my friend had also been a good friend of the priest’s. The priest in his sermon was essentially condemning our friend to hell. I have no idea what that priest was thinking.
I consider myself a Buddhist now and it has been through my Buddhist study that I have come to love and appreciate Jesus Christ and his teachings. And this is where my confusion comes in. How does the Catholic Church in Juneau reconcile Christ’s teachings about love with their desire to deny something so fundamental in our society as a job or housing? And this desire of the Church to deny someone a job implicitly condones other organizations doing the same thing; for example, a young man who lost his job at a local seafood processor after being seen on break with his partner.
How does this take priority over love as Christ taught?
My husband is a deeply spiritual man. We have amazing conversations where we dig deep into the essence of Christian and Buddhist teachings, reaching into our hearts and struggling — and succeeding — to communicate to each other the breathtaking beauty within these traditions.
When he and I started seeing each other five years ago, he attended mass every week. I went with him at times, and he had also begun serving as a lector, beautifully reading the Scripture in his melodious voice.
My husband is an honest man. After telling a local priest that he had been divorced and remarried outside the Catholic Church, the priest told him that he could no longer serve as a lector. Worse yet, he could no longer take communion, or the Eucharist as they call it in the Catholic Church.
Our local diocese, in seeming contradiction to the messages from Pope Francis and from Jesus himself, is driving away, painfully so, this deeply spiritual and devoted Catholic. And now they are promoting discrimination against my many gay friends. I really don’t know what these men stand for, and I don’t know how love is finding a place in it.
• Michelle Bonnet Hale is from Juneau.
