U.S. Bishops Try to Block Federal LGBTQ Suicide Hotline

Catholic journalists break appalling story

The story I have to write today is so appalling, it’s hard to accept as true. When I learned that a group of powerful religious men maneuvered behind the scenes during the Trump Administration to block funding for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ people, I sucked my breath in against anguish.

For background, when I was a teenager and young adult struggling to reconcile my Catholic/Evangelical upbringing with the fact that I’m gay, I came close to killing myself. Twice. That’s one reason I became an LGBTQ activist. Queer youth are over five times more likely than their cis/straight peers to attempt suicide.

They’re at far higher risk of dying, because suicide attempts by queer youth are more likely to be fatal. Transgender teens suffer the most disproportionate risk, while gay boys attempt suicide in the highest total numbers. LGBTQ youth suicide in the United States is a genuine underreported crisis.

U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference tried to stop LGBTQ suicide hotline

Here’s where we get to the anguishing part of the story. Starting in 2019, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. congresspeople and senators worked to pass the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act to establish and fund a toll-free number to assist people in crisis.

The law finally passed last fall, a remarkable bipartisan accomplishment for the Trump era. The hotline is up and running, a website offers resources for those in crisis and and their loved ones, and LGBTQ youth are welcome and specifically included. That’s the great part of this story.

But in a shocking development the National Catholic Reporter broke last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the official body that represents the Catholic hierarchy, maneuvered behind the scenes for almost two years to block passage.

The NCR say the bishops lobbied against the law because and only because it funds suicide intervention for LGBTQ people. Cick here to check out the life-affirming, life-saving resources the hotline website offers, and ask yourself what the bishops opposed.

The NCR spells the opposition out. The U.S. Bishops Conference doesn’t accept the fact that people can have minority gender identities and sexual orientations. They tried to block the bill because it goes against their view of “anthropology,” a term they use outside its ordinary scientific definition.

Despite the uncontested fact that LGBTQ youth in the U.S. die of suicide at high, hugely disproportionate rates, the bishops opposed crisis intervention because in their view we LGBTQ people don’t actually exist and we should not be included in laws as if we really do.

The bishops lobby against protecting women for the same reason

The NCR further reports that the bishops are trying to block the Violence Against Women Act, bipartisan legislation that funds an office for the prosecution of violent crimes against women. The law includes protection for lesbians, bisexual women and trans women, all of whom suffer disproportionate rates of violence compared to cis/straight women.

The bishops insist LGBTQ women don’t meet their anthropological and theological definitions, and must not be included in the bill, notwithstanding that the violence problem is undisputed and severe.

“All persons must be protected from violence, but codifying the classifications ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ … is problematic,” the bishops wrote in a statement in 2013 when they lobbied against passage, demanding specific protection for LGBTQ people be removed from the bill.

The Catholic press is doing great work

The bishops have not released a similar public statement detailing their opposition to the suicide hotline law, but the NCR claims their reasoning is the same, citing unnamed sources with access to the bishops’ deliberations.

(This is where I have to hold back my anger. I started this article as a white-hot rant, but I’m afraid of turning readers off. Still, I want to scream at the bishops, “How dare you! How dare you value cold ideology over lives! How dare you be so cruel!”)

The NCR’s reporting comes on the heels of a shocking anti-LGBTQ document released by the Vatican on March 15, which instructs priests not to bless same-sex unions and not to bless individual gay people not committed to celibacy. The document, which Pope Francis affirmed in a move contrary to ordinary papal custom, re-asserts all the harshest Catholic doctrines regarding LGBTQ people, including that we are intrinsically disordered and commit acts of “grave depravity” when we form loving sexual partnerships.

In response to that document, the NCR published an official editorial calling Pope Francis a hypocrite, saying their editorial staff of faithful Catholics “have whiplash.”

Respect, sensitivity, and unjust discrimination

News of the Catholic hierarchy trying to stop laws to protect women from violence and to help youth struggling with suicidal thoughts touches directly on this controversy. It has to be one of the reasons the NCR chose to break this story, which puts the bishops in an appalling light.

The March 15 Vatican decree disclaims its harshness by calling for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward gay (though not trans) people, repeating the Catechism’s exhortation to refrain from “unjust discrimination.” But Catholics all over the world are speaking out with outraged voices claiming that no act of anti-LGBTQ discrimination seems to meet the hierarchy’s definition of unjust.

The NCR’s shocking story illustrates that problem tragically well

If trying to stop a suicide hotline because it reaches out to queer youth is not a form of unjust discrimination, is anything? If a law seeking to protect women from violence is unacceptable because it protects queer women too, does “unjust discrimination” have any non-theoretical meaning?

If LGBTQ people don’t exist by the bishops’ view of anthropology, is “unjust discrimination” even a theoretical possibility for them?

No wonder the bishops oppose the Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ people from being discriminated against in civil society. No wonder they opposed ENDA, which offered far more limited protection from discrimination in employment.

The Catholic hierarchy, going right up to Pope Francis if he knowingly affirmed the decree of March 15, are implacably opposed to recognizing LGBTQ people as fully moral human beings who deserve all the same liberties and rights as anyone else.

The vast majority of faithful Catholics in the United States have a big problem with that. From my rural Catholic cousins in Ohio who love the Church for its work in social justice, right up to the editorial staff of the NCR, Catholics in the United States say they find anti-LGBTQ discrimination appalling. Lay Catholics are actually more likely than the average American to support equality for LGBTQ people.

But they’re faced with the evident problem that Catholic leadership seems bent on clinging to discrimination and actively working against the interests of LGBTQ people. It’s anguishing to imagine them trying to stop a suicide hotline for queer youth, but NCR reporters say they did.

Catholics don’t know what to do in the face of this discrimination

Journalists like at NCR can at least expose the bishops and their effectively hateful actions. But what are ordinary Catholics like my cousins to do? At least one of them decided after the March 15 decree to seek a new spiritual community outside the Church. She started by taking her children to an Episcopalian service yesterday, but she doesn’t know if that will work out for her.

I can respect that, but I emailed her the NCR article about the suicide hotline. I want her to know what her support will prop up if she goes back to the congregation she’s been part of since we were children together. The bishops conference has no power without the laity’s money and without making the moral claim that they represent the laity.

As it happens, my cousin is a clinical social worker whose caseload includes LGBTQ teens. She knows what their suicide risk is, because knowing is part of her job. Plus, it’s personal. LGBTQ teens have confided their struggles to her. She makes herself available without judgement, and she hands out that hotline number.

As a deeply compassionate Catholic woman, she can’t understand how the bishops oppose helping these kids. Can you? Can you join us sending a message that their unjust discrimination is appalling and unacceptable?

James Finn is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, and an “agented” novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].