Dolan has killed gay kids and continues to do so
that is what makes him unacceptable to give a benediction anywhere, let alone at our convention.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-siciliano/cardinal-dolan-lgbt-youth_b_1363153.html
Cardinal Dolan, I write to you as the director of the Ali Forney Center, the nation's largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBT youth. I am writing to you on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of LGBT youths who have been driven from their homes by parents unwilling or unable to accept their own children because they are gay. And I write to you as a member of the Archdiocese of New York who is deeply ashamed by the ways that his bishop contributes to the abuse and harm suffered by these youths.
I want you to understand how you, and other religious leaders who fight against the acceptance of LGBT people, are helping to create a national tragedy. As youths find the courage and integrity to be honest about who they are at younger ages, hundreds of thousands are being turned out of their homes and forced to survive alone on the streets by parents who cannot accept having a gay child. Parental rejection has become so prevalent that LGBT youths make up an astonishing 40 percent of the nation's homeless youth population.
Do you know that a recent study of family rejection found that parents who identify themselves as "strongly religious" are much more likely to reject their LGBT children?
Certainly you must see your responsibility in fostering a climate where parents turn on their own children, for you have been a loud and strident voice against the acceptance of LGBT people as equal members of our society. When you compare being gay to being an alcoholic, as you did in interviews with the local media, you cause parents who give credence to you to see their LGBT children in terms of sickness and addiction. When you equate the state of New York with Communist China for granting its LGBT citizens marriage equality, you make the acceptance of LGBT people seem menacing and evil. You recently wrote to President Obama threatening "a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions" because of the Obama administration's decision not to support a federal ban on gay marriage. I hope that you understand that thousands of LGBT teens will be wounded in this conflict you have decided to escalate.
When you use your position as a religious leader to fight the acceptance of LGBT persons as equal members of our society, you inevitably make many parents less able to accept their own LGBT children.
I ask you to consider the enormous human suffering caused by parental rejection. The number of LGBT youths left in abject destitution and homelessness after being driven from their homes is estimated by the federal government to be between 120,000 and 240,000. Many of these youths have no way to support themselves except through prostitution. In New York City 20 percent of the homeless LGBT youth become infected with HIV. Youths who are rejected by their families suffer from elevated rates of depression and other mental illness; they are much more likely to abuse substances. Most alarmingly, LGBT youths who are rejected by their families are eight and a half times more likely to be suicidal than those whose families accept them.
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Replace gay with any other kind of person and he would be persona non grata. We know better.
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