We have a very similar dynamic happening in Michigan. The church here just finished a cycle of spending millions to defeat a proposed LGBTQ equality law. I wrote up the details for an article a few months ago, and while I don't remember the specifics of the top of my head, they dropped at least 3 million dollars in one two-year period alone.

During the same time, the Bishop of Detroit launched a witch hunt against lesbian and gay teachers and other employees, even firing a lifelong parish organist and music director from her paid position only a couple of years before she was scheduled to retire with benefits. All because she married her partner.

The same bishop then ordered the LGBTQ-Catholic group Dignity USA off diocese property — where they had been meeting and worshiping for decades.

The bishop of Marquette (whose diocese consists of the entire upper peninsula of Michigan) issued a pastoral letter instructing all the priests in his diocese to deny all Church sacraments to gay people in committed relationships or marriages and to transgender people living their gender identity.

All Church sacraments. That's not exactly excommunication, but it is certainly expulsion from the community.

At least in Michigan, the Catholic Church has spoken up loudly and clearly to LGBTQ people: Get out. You are neither welcome nor wanted in Michigan's Catholic communities.

This is how leaders in the Catholic Church in the United States overall are behaving today. They're making hatred of LGBTQ people and opposition to abortion central to what it means to be Catholic.

In Michigan, that means the pews just keep emptying out. Every Sunday, fewer and fewer people walk in the doors of Catholic churches.

And those millions of parishioner dollars the Church spent here to stop that equality law? Wasted. A few weeks ago, our Supreme Court ruled that existing equality laws already apply to gay people, and they strongly signaled that they will make the same decision with respect to transgender people as soon as an appropriate case makes its way to them.

So all those hard-earner parishioner dollars the Church spent to push hatred are right down the drain.