Pope Francis has blessed civil same-sex unions but says gays can’t be married in the church, because what they’re doing is a sin.

So gay people are good enough for the state but not good enough for the church. Good to know.

Whatever happened to religion’s famous “hate the sin but love the sinner”? That turns out to be an impossible needle to thread. For the sin is apparently inseparable from the sinner. Georgia’s Crapabble First Baptist Church has cut ties with Richard Aaron Long, who killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent., in the Atlanta massage parlor shootings because of what he described as a sexual addiction. (What is it with shooters and three names — Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth?) I make no excuses for this man, who belongs to the long list of the literature of rejection, filled with men, usually young and white, who have a sense of self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate rage at rejection or some other supposed grievance.

But perhaps if religion spent less time equating sexual pleasure with sin and guilt and more time concentrating on actual love for humanity, we would at least eliminate one motivating factor in Long’s hate crimes, for they are truly hate crimes in the deepest sense of the term — a hatred of self that he had to turn on others lest he implode.

Were his crimes, however, also racist?…

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