Over the weekend, I read all about how the LDS church has just issued a document that is extraordinarily hateful to transgender Mormons. I don't just mean doctrine and theology. I mean, they've announced that they're going to treat transgender Mormons like shit.

If you're a transgender teenager, no sleepaway camp for you. No overnights at all with church groups.

Trans adult? Forbidden from working with children. No using any restroom in a Mormon facility unless it's single occupancy. In an emergency, somebody can guard a restroom for you to make sure nobody goes in while you're in there. Because you must pee alone.

Because, obviously, being trans, your mere presence will disgust and probably damage cis Mormons who need to pee. God says so. Or maybe some angel who's in the habit of handing out graven tablets to grifters!

Catholics? Doctrinally, dogmatically, they label us queer people as literally depraved and disordered. As in, when we have sex with the people we love, we commit "acts of grave depravity.' Loving our partners is an "intrinsic disorder."

And Pope Francis? He's cracked down as hard as he can on wildly popular movements in the German-speaking Catholic world that are working hard to reform those sickening teachings.

Francis, the supposed kind pope, is up in arms about that proposed reform. He wants to keep calling us depraved. He wants to keep saying that we're intrinsically disordered. It's a big deal to him. Super important doctrine!

Not to even mention that a couple months ago, he instructed Catholic officials not to allow openly gay men to train for the priesthood in seminary, because the seminaries are already too full of fagotry. He used an Italian word rather than the English slur I just used, but my Italian friends assure me his slur is every bit as horrible in Italian as it is in English.

And that vicious, disgusting, hate-speech-spewing pope is bandied about by religious people as a friend of the gays.

With friends like that homophobic pig, who needs enemies?

Then consider that most American priests and bishops are even more homophobic and more routinely publicly hateful than Francis!

Any surprise Catholic pews are emptying out and Catholic services often resemble geriatric conventions?

Ditto, the Mormons. They don't have as big a problem as the Catholic Church with young people leaving, but they have a significant problem. Hate and nastiness are unattractive, so loads of Mormon youth get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they practically can.

I could get into U.S. Evangelical churches too, which I have more personal experience with, but it's the same story with slightly different details.

They're just a seriously nasty, hateful bunch of people. They increasingly base their religious identity and their moral values on who they hate and discriminate against.

Fuck em.

Seriously, who needs that? Who wants it? Statistically, increasing numbers of people just don't want that kind of evil in their lives. And that's probably going to continue — as religious leaders seemingly double down on their nastiness, more and more every year.

For example, Catholic priests and bishops in the United States are far more outspoken in their anti-LGBTQ hatred than they ever used to be. They absolutely lost their shit when the Supreme Court held the same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is more far-right extremist now than in living memory. Probably because they're reacting to societal and moral evolution that they quite evidently have no control over.

People aren't interested in their moral condemnation, they barely even listen to it, so the bishops shout louder with messages that feel increasingly deranged to the average person, making the average person even less likely to want to have anything to do with the bishops.

Which makes them shout even louder, and so the cycle continues. And the churches empty out even further.

Which, from my perspective as a depraved, intrinsically disordered faggot is quite positive.

Keep it up, guys! Keep burning your house down! You can do it! Rah rah rah!