It's been really awful to watch this anti-contraception ideology unfold and take off.

When I was a kid in Baptist churches, Baptists pretty much didn't have anything against abortion. Certainly wasn't a hot issue for them. That all started to change with the Moral Majority, as Jerry Falwell and Co searched for a hot social issue to push instead of racist segregation, which they realized put them on the wrong side of history.

Demonizing abortion and gay people became their new social issues. And over the decades since then, conservative Protestant Christians in the United States have increasingly allied with Roman Catholic activists.

I never expected Protestants to take on the Catholic ethos against contraceptives, but they sure have! Something you never would have heard before has become almost common.

And as a gay man, I feel I have a lot of stake here too. After all, why does the Catholic Church demonize us and describe us in their catechism as literally depraved and disordered?

Because we have sex for non-reproductive purposes! The Church demands that we forego intimate, sexual relationships — claiming that pursuing a romantic life is literally depraved when we do it.

They don't even care if the so-called clobber passages in the Bible are actually condemnations of homosexuality or not. They've built their vicious condemnation of people like me on their own innovative philosophy of sex for procreation only.

That's why gay men where I live in Michigan aren't even allowed to be buried in a Catholic cemetery or receive any other rite of the Church. That's why when a gay man in my area was invited to a Catholic school to read from his newly published book (which has absolutely nothing to do with queer issues), the priest in charge of the parish apologized to parents and assured them that no gay person would ever again be invited to speak to their children.

That's why the priest's bishop supported him.

It's all about demonizing sexuality and intimate sexual relationships unless the relationship exists to bring a child into the world.

We humans are destroying the world with our exploding population, so it's a total a mystery to me why religious people are so intent on continuing that explosion.

This attack on contraception, from both the Protestant and Catholic Christian worlds, is extremely worrying.

All people of good will should push back as hard as they can against this attack on basic humanity and loving relationships.

It's past time for us to stop tolerating religion demonizing sexuality. It was bad enough when the Catholic Church made the AIDS crisis so much worse by fighting to stop condom distribution, often succeeding in strangling distribution.

We should have learned our lesson then, but it's never too late.