Mr. President, the Equality Act Defies Your Church's Teaching

Dear Mr. President,

This is my third open letter in the pages of Newsweek, addressing you as a fellow American Catholic. The reason for these public overtures is self-evident: the United States has never before had a president who touts his religious credentials and bona fides, even as he backs one policy after another that subverts his church's teachings. So long as this dissonance continues, it needs addressing—if only to clarify a few basics about what Catholicism teaches, and what it doesn't.

We are not speaking here of issues about which citizens might reasonably disagree, like the fair distribution of taxes, the filibuster, the canceling of the Keystone pipeline and so on. We are focusing instead on the policies of your presidency that would, if taken to their logical conclusion, flagrantly contradict quintessential Church teachings. Your administration's bare-knuckled promotion of abortion under any circumstances, as I mentioned in my first letter, is one example. The subject of letter two—your refusal to interfere with the mounting attacks upon, and silencing of, your fellow Catholics—is one more case in point.

To these now add another public traducing of the precepts of the Magisterium: your team's rapturous support of the so-called Equality Act.

Mr. President, I'm not a theologian. And that is exactly the point. If the Equality Act's anti-religious repercussions are so obvious that members of the laity can enumerate them, how much more brazen must they appear to the Catholic hierarchy? Anyone who has eyed the faith even casually can see that the Equality Act thumbs its nose at the Bible, which begins "male and female He created them," and ends with ineradicably "gendered" visions in Revelations.

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