Dan Savage Rails Against Hawaii Religious Leader

The following article is provided by Civil Beat.

By Nathan Eagle

The one and only Dan Savage told me this week that the Catholic church should “get out of the homophobia business” if its leaders like Honolulu Bishop Larry Silva really care about the well-being of Hawaii’s keiki [children].

The influential sex columnist didn’t stop there. I just couldn’t print everything in the initial piece for the sake of brevity and, well, his fondness for using colorful language to express distaste and disdain for someone, like when he referred to the bishop by a compound term that starts with “mother.”

I initially called Savage to ask what he thought about one of the highest-ranking religious leaders in Hawaii telling his faithful followers that they should fight the effort to legalize gay marriage because kids with gay parents are more prone to kill themselves.

We did a Fact Check of Silva’s claim and found it to be False. (You can read it here.)

Savage’s first reaction was to say Silva had a lot of gall, and that “If I could get within arm’s length of him I’d slap him.”

But he went on to say, unequivocally, that Silva’s “attacking same-sex couples who are parenting like this is despicable, particularly coming from the Catholic church … considering how many vulnerable children they’ve violated.”

“There are more kids out there who need parents than there are parents to take care of those kids,” Savage told me. “Kids are a whole helluva lot safer with their same-sex parents than they are with a Catholic priest.”

Read more about the same-sex marriage issue on Civil Beat here.