Thank you so much for sharing your story! It's really important. This is the part that maybe hit me the hardest. The Church's stand on condoms is something I've fought almost my entire life, starting as an HIV/safer-sex educator with Act Up NYC in the 1990s.

AIDS was ravaging queer communities and communities of color. We desperately needed to get more people using condoms, and the Catholic Church fought us tooth and nail. The leveraged their relationship with law enforcement sometimes to have us arrested for teaching about safer sex. They lobbied to pass laws to keep condom distribution and safer sex information hard to receive.

As we died like flies.

And then a decade later, Church leaders repeated the same b******* in Africa as the epidemic took off there and made the one in North America look like nothing.

Even today, as the epidemic rages out of control in Africa, many Catholic bishops there are fighting condoms like they're fighting the devil himself.

I personally can't imagine the twisted, cruel, authoritarian mindset of Catholic bishops. I can't imagine how they can push for actions they know will kill people.

Something about the religion just twists there consciences, I guess. It sickens their souls, I guess, to speak metaphorically.

But this ... in your story. I couldn't help but cry a little bit involuntarily when I read about the girl who admitted to you that she had sex but was proud of herself for not using a condom.

I despair!