Savage and Insensitive Church Language Must End

LGBTQ people deserve dignity and respect

Catholic priests march for LGBTQ equality. Image by Nataliia Sokolovskaia from Shutterstock

What does LGBTQ Pride mean to you?

I’ll tell you what it means to me. It means refusing to be ashamed of who I am. It means raising my voice loudly to reject condemnation, stigmatization, and Othering.

When I was a little boy, I used to regularly cry myself to sleep, horrified to realize that that I was “dirty, sinful, and shameful.” I was less than my fellow human beings

Less moral. Less good. Less valuable.

Discovering Myself as a Gay Kid, Fighting Shame

In the language of the Roman Catholic and evangelical Christian faiths my family worshiped in, I was a “depraved sinner.”

I’ve never told anyone this before, and honestly, I think I’d mostly forgotten about it. When I was 14 and 15 years old, I used to cut deeply and extensively into my belly with with a razor blade. I stuck needles into my arms. I pulled out clumps of my hair until I bled. I’d never heard of self harm. Nobody talked about that in the 1970s…