Writing from the perspective of a gay man who would have been driven from my home church even if I’d wanted to stay, I think you raise important points.

I’m reminded of a story I wrote a while back about how the US Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied behind the scenes in Congress to scuttle a bipartisan bill that established a national suicide hotline.

They did so because the law, which eventually passed, established specific resources for LGBTQ people to reach out to when they were in mental health crisis. This acknowledges that trans and gay people have specific needs sometimes that can be best addressed by experts.

But that was too much for the bishops ideologically, so they spent time, energy, and a non-trivial amount of donated money to try to stop the law from going into effect.

The weird thing about this is that most Catholic laypeople in the United States utterly oppose the Catholic clergy’s extremist homophobia. Lay Catholics in the United States are slightly more likely to support LGBTQ equality and acceptance then the general public.

So the question is, why do so many of them stay in their churches? Crucially, why do they allow their money to be used to fight for causes they intensely oppose?

Maybe those are good questions to pose when considering whether to leave a church.