Week before last, a Catholic Bishop in Hawaii spoke out against the Marriage Equality law, and while doing so claimed that children raised by same sex couples were at very high risk for becoming suicidal. Dan Savage, a Seattle-based nationally-syndicated sex advice columnist and gay activist, appeared on Bill Maher’s show, and Maher mentioned this Bishop’s statement. One reason to mention it, besides the fact that Savage is always good for some commentary on a gay rights issue, is because Savage was raised Catholic (and has written eloquently about how his Mom’s Catholic faith is where she gained the determination to became a fierce pro-gay activist). So Dan has written and talked a lot about the Catholic church’s stand on gay rights as opposed to its more supportive members.

Anyway, Dan replied that the Bishop was confusing kids raised by same sex parents with the actual statistics about kids raped by pedophile priests.

This set many conservatives and Catholic pundits into an uproar, accusing Dan’s comments of being hate speech, or even a hate crime, or at the very least disrespectful.

The problem is that it was none of those things.

Dan didn’t say that all priests were pedophiles. He was referring to the very real studies that have shown that children molested by clergy are much more likely to become suicidal than other kids. He went on to less flippantly explain how the Catholic hierarchy doesn’t have the right to claim moral high ground especially in regards to raising children because of the hundreds of pedophile priests that the church actively protected for decades, covered up for, and would repeatedly reassign to new parishes where they would have more opportunities to molest.

The other part, that he only alluded to briefly, is that there are absolutely no credible studies that have ever shown the children raised by same sex couples are more likely to be suicidal, or to suffer from depression, or to suffer any other harms. The closest that anyone has come are some studies that showed that living in a society that disparaged their parents and excused bullying directed at the children because of their same sex parents does have a detrimental effect. But even then, the problem is not the same sex parents, the problem is the prejudice. A prejudice that is somewhat ameliorated by things like marriage equality laws.

Because not only is there no evidence to back up the Bishop’s claim, but rather there are hundreds of studies that show the opposite—and studies showing that hearing the message from neighbors, pastors, and society at large that gays are abominations and such contributes to teen suicide—at the very least, the Bishop’s statement was misinformed. Given how many times someone in his position has been confronted with these facts, I have to go a couple steps further and say that the Bishop’s statement was a lie. There are absolutely no facts to back it up, so the only possible reasons someone as highly educated as he is would continue to spout such falsehoods is a deeply held animus to gay and lesbian people.

In other words, the Bishop’s statement is the only hate speech in this story.

And respect? In what universe is a pedophile priest deserving of respect? By what moral code does an organization that shields such priests, an organization in which some of its leaders have gone so far as to try to claim that the fault lies in the children for being so “tempting”, deserve any respect?

Meanwhile, New York’s Cardinal Dolan in an interview has claimed that the Church’s anti-gay reputation is a result of “the gays” having a better marketing campaign that has “caricatured” the church as anti-gay. That’s right, the only reason people think the Catholic Church is prejudiced against gay people is because we’ve hoodwinked the rest of the world into thinking they’re anti-gay, when they clearly aren’t.

There are so many problems with this, but the biggest is simply this: the most prominent world leader who has called the church anti-gay this year was the new Pope. Does the Cardinal really think that Pope Francis’ only knowledge of the Catholic Church comes from reading gay news blogs?

On the topic of marriage equality, it isn’t that the church has been out-marketed, it’s been out-logicked. The only arguments it can come up with against marriage equality are ones that either have been disproven, or which don’t make sense even to most of their own members in America and Europe. The really sad thing is that they don’t realize they lost the civil marriage argument decades ago. The vast majority of people in the industrialized world, at least, have all agreed that while divorce isn’t the desired outcome of a marriage, that the legal system should allow it (because people, particularly young people, make mistakes and get married when they shouldn’t, or get married to someone that they wouldn’t have if they knew then what they know now), and should not impose any one church’s doctrinal definition of marriage on all citizens.

We especially shouldn’t impose the definition coming from a Church that for many, many years was more concerned with protecting pedophile priests and its own reputation than the children who were victimized by those priests. As Jesus said, “First remove the log from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”