Petition Asking Cardinal George to resign after defaming LGBT people.

After almost a quarter of a century hearing confessions and counseling individuals and families, I know that sexual orientation is not merely a political, sociological or psychological issue. At core, what this is truly about is discrimination and its hurtful and harmful impact on simple human dignity and the lives of real people.


Bullying, employment discrimination, denial of service in the armed-forces under the recently repealed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, denial of adoption rights, denial of Civil Marriage rights, all attempt to force LGBT people into lives of secrecy, shame, denial, fear and foster self-hatred. The Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Study of 1999 found that 33% of gay adolescents attempt suicide. A statistic that we were tragically reminded of last year when several young LGBT students took their own lives. That is the true cost of bigotry in the lives of countless LGBT people, their families and loved ones.


Cardinal George’s comparison of LGBT people who are simply seeking full Federal equality as American citizens with the KKK, a notorious hate group that seeks to deny full Federal equality to minorities, is both an inversion and a denial of the truth. George’s words constitute both a grave injustice and a moral outrage. By vilifying members of a minority group he targets them for prejudice and hate crimes.


A simple apology is insufficient, since an apology is merely a public announcement of one’s personal feelings. I believe that cardinal George is morally required to ask for forgiveness of the LGBT people, their families and loved ones, who he has vilified. His immediate resignation, upon asking for forgiveness, would manifest his sincerity and serve as a reproach to bigotry in our society.

I invite you to sign a petition from Change.org asking Cardinal George to resign as Archbishop of Chicago due to his defamation of LGBT people.

Cardinal George attempts to raise fears about LGBT people.

Cardinal George of Chicago objected to an LGBT parade in that city. Claiming that it would force the cancellation of Mass at a church along the parade route. The Huffington Post reported

"I go with the pastor," George told Fox. "He's telling us that he won't be able to have services on Sunday if that's the case. You don't want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism."

The preceding quote makes it appear that this “poor pastor” desperately called the “good” cardinal for help. Fear that his services might be interrupted, or that Catholics might be targeted for harassment by rioting LGBT parade attendees.


Don’t believe it for a moment. Having lived as a pastor for decades I can tell you how the system works. The pastor in question most probably got a phone call from the Archdiocese “asking” him to write to the cardinal about the LGBT parade routed pass his church. Failure to express what the cardinal wanted to hear in that letter would impact unfavorably on the pastor’s future career.


The pastor lives and works in that community, many of the folks in the parade are either his parishioners, or family members/relatives of his parishioners, he does not want to alienate these people. Furthermore, Chicago is a large city, there are countless parades held there every year and most of them on weekends. Odds are that, like most Catholic priests, the pastor (as well as the cardinal) is gay.


Sadly, I am not surprised by cardinal George’s absurd assertion comparing the LGBT communities struggle for full Federal Equality, with the KKK. My former bishop, the late John Steinbock, compared the LGBT community with, “Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.” The disturbing fact is that it is the Catholic bishops who are using strong-arm tactics against LGBT people who simply seek equality.


It is the bishops who have consistently orchestrated political campaigns against LGBT people and their families. This despite the fact that the majority of U.S. Catholics are supportive of equality legislation for LGBT people, but then again the only opinion on LGBT rights that concerns George is that of the out-going pope.


In the middle of what some have called the Second Great Depression and the Sexual Abuse Cover-Up Scandals that have rocked the Catholic church both in the USA and internationally, implicating even the current pope himself, cardinal George’s chief pastoral concern is not helping the jobless, the homeless or addressing the Cover-Up scandal. It is lobbying, in a vain attempt, to keep LGBT people in the closet socially and second-class citizens legally.