Why Was My Church on the Side of the Homophobes?

There is something about growing up Roman Catholic that holds people forever, whether they end up among the faithful or not. It’s like a club you can’t resign from, even if you never go to meetings. I grew up Roman Catholic. So did David Eder. He is in his 30s. I’m in my 40s. He is gay and single. I am straight and married. He is among the faithful. I am not.

Still, Eder and I share a question that, two weeks after this month’s election, continues to mystify: What in heaven’s name was our church thinking when it mixed itself up in the campaign for Proposition 22, the anti-gay-marriage referendum on bigotry?

“I remember the moment I found out,” Eder recalled the other day. He’s a soft-spoken guy who works for the city of Los Angeles. “I was at a fund-raiser for the Serra Project, which is a hospice program--a friend had two free tickets--and I ran into the assistant at the archdiocese’s gay and lesbian ministry, and I asked how she was doing, and she said not well, that the California Catholic bishops had donated some $300,000 to this initiative.

“I just about fell over. And then I looked behind me, and there was Cardinal Mahony! He was standing by the silent auction, looking at the bids for some free tickets to a Dodgers game! And I thought, ‘How could that man--that good, smart man, a Dodgers fan, even--how could he be involved in something like this?’ ”

It may have passed by a 3-2 margin, but Prop. 22 was an open exercise in the sort of wedge politics that the Catholic Church has generally abhorred. Everyone knew its author, state Sen. Pete Knight, was a right-winger with an estranged gay son; Howard Ahmanson--the wealthy Calvinist who once helped run a group whose founder advocated the death penalty for homosexuals--was among its big contributors.

At a preelection GOP prayer breakfast featuring Knight in Burlingame last month, the tenor of the pro-Knight effort was clear.

According to the San Francisco Examiner, state party Chaplain Doc Burch joked about public schools taking teenagers into a “gay and lesbian and homosexual recruiting office” and asking about their sexual feelings, knowing full well that “every hairy-legged boy I’ve ever known was hornier than a two-peckered goat.” After which Burch reportedly called homosexuality “not norm” and noted that, though his wife has a lesbian relative, “the last two stages of decadence of any nation that ever fell from within was sacrificing their babies and homosexuality.” After which a co-founder of Campus Crusade for Christ reportedly compared homosexuality to “pornography and filth” and said that if this country continued to tolerate gays and lesbians, it would end up like Nazi Germany and the defunct Soviet Union, which “expelled God.”

To this, the California Catholic Conference gave its troops and money. Never mind that a cornerstone of church doctrine is the inherent dignity of all women and men. “I was so upset, I didn’t go to church for a month and a half,” Eder said. “I wrote to the cardinal, asking what was the point here?” It took a month for the archdiocese to reply.

Their explanation stressed another church obligation, to uphold the family. Which would be fine if Prop. 22 actually helped families somehow. It didn’t. It reiterated an existing state law that already limits marriage to one man and one woman. The pitch was that Vermont might OK same-sex marriages and that California might have to recognize them. In fact, the Vermont lawmakers appear headed for nothing more radical than a broad version of domestic partnership.

So there was no threat, only an interest in whipping up voters. And though conservative Catholics had pushed a theological doctrine declaring homosexuals to be “objectively disordered,” anti-gay lobbying had been generally eschewed by the wider church. Mahony and the other members of the Catholic Conference had to know that they were abetting hatred. His December press release on Prop. 22 mentioned the dignity of homosexuals so many times, you had to read it twice to figure out that, yes, the church had endorsed this thing.

And yet the Archdiocese of Los Angeles put nearly $150,000 into the kitty. On election day, in his local version of the pope’s Lenten plea for forgiveness, Mahony--incredibly--apologized for past instances of Catholic homophobia, but uttered not a word about the homophobia the church was underwriting as he spoke. A spokesman for the archdiocese sounded just as pitiful last week: “We all face moral dilemmas, and often the most gut-wrenching are those in which two goods come into conflict,” he said.

The church’s stance, he insisted, was “pro-marriage, not anti-gay.” That’s not an answer--not for Catholics like David Eder, and not for Catholics like me.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.