I count my blessings everyday.  I really do.  My husband Gary and I say a prayer of thanks each night before dinner for all the wonderful opportunities, love and support that we have in our lives.  Our daughter is a shining light of love.  Our families respect us as individuals and as a couple.  We have good jobs, food on our table and live comfortably in New York City.  What else could we ask for?  We learned the answer to that question over the holidays.

While sitting with his 80 year old parents at Catholic mass in the Western Pennsylvania town of Greensburg, Gary was confronted with what is increasingly becoming the greatest single threat to our legal system since George Bush: Christian-based discrimination.  As he walked into the service he saw the blue brochures everywhere.  They said, “The institution of marriage is under attack and the time has come for Pennsylvanians to take action.”  They use the words, “THREAT” and “DANGER” and ask, “Do really care about marriage?”

”Do you care enough to really do something?”  Anyone who doesn't realize what is really going on will of course, answer, “Yes!”  Unfortunately, the brochures are seeking support for an anti-marriage amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution making it impossible for any same-sex couples to marry there, as well as barring recognition of any legally performed same-sex marriage, like Gary's and mine.

The brochures never use the words, “gay,” “lesbian,” “same-sex” or even homosexual.  They bargain on the reader not realizing that their own gay family members or friends are the direct targets of this hate-based campaign.

The homily, or sermon for you non-Catholics, started and Monsignor Raymond Riffle, a priest who was somewhat new to the Parrish and who had not quite proved himself to Gary's family or the church, began his tirade.  “Marriage is under attack and it is time that the Catholic Church stood up for itself and got, ‘political.’”  

Gary stood up for himself and walked up the aisle and out of the church.  He was noticeably upset and a couple hundred congregants who knew Gary personally witnessed his exit.  It was as if he was punched in the stomach and stabbed in the back.  Gary grew up in that church.  He went to Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school and a Catholic college.  He was inculcated with the best qualities that the church had to offer, a sense of community and a sense of compassion.  I benefit from those qualities everyday.  And now, that same community was turning its back on one of the most caring and inspired individuals the church had ever shaped.

Gary called me in tears from the car and asked if I would come and assist his parents out of the church.  He couldn't bring himself to go back inside.  I arrived just as the service was ending and was the first person that the priest encountered as he completed his recessional walk up the aisle and out of the sanctuary.

I approached him and said, “Father, You know Gary and I.  You know our family.  We have been a part of this church for 18 years and you know that we are not a threat to marriage or Catholicism.”  I said that the campaign was absolutely wrong.  Monsignor Riffle could not look me in the eye.  You see he did know Gary and me.  We had often spoken and he had spent time together with our family on numerous occasions.  He managed to repeat the stock response that the church had always believed that marriage was between one man and one woman.  “It has always been this way.”  I said that the church had not always attempted to amend Pennsylvania's State Constitution to make discrimination legal until very recently and it was still wrong.  

He uncomfortably asked that we continue the conversation at another time.  I purposefully stood by him for a while, saying to each person who took a blue brochure that, “discrimination was not Godly and was not Catholic.”  Some sneered, some chose not to take a brochure, and when an usher asked me to leave, I refused.  I said, “I absolutely will not leave, because I am a gay man who is married and my family is no threat to this church.”  He could not have walked away from me faster.

We were both emotionally spent after that evening mass, but we both knew that we were meant to be there.  Even Gary's parents, whose hearts were also broken, knew that the church was attempting to scare up extra Republican votes in a swing state for a presidential election.  But they were deeply hurt.  It’s true, we were meant to be right there.  We were meant to explain to those churchgoers that we were not a threat.  The real threat is a Christian militia that uses its influence over peaceful and otherwise caring people to scare them into doing its own political dirty work.