At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.
Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.
Every organization does good and bad things.
The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
If your love didn’t always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.
I have found that the greatest stories of acceptance and love and the ugliest stories of hideous cruelty and abuse have equally been perpetrated in the name of Christian faith.
The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad; and also deeply bewildering.
Being gay is immutable. Maybe someday we’ll figure out more of the science and it will be changeable, but we have no leads so far.
If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.
I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.
There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, “The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures.” The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
Religion is so focused on family. These days, for many people, being gay is also focused on family.
I’m a huge believer in science. But I don’t think it explains everything.
I believe that organized religion is an ornament to the truth, and that aesthetics are part of its power.
There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.
There is a great deal of sin that comes from homosexuals who believe their homosexuality is a sin.