Two gay George Washington University
students are organizing to remove an anti-gay priest.
Seniors Damian Legacy and Blake Bergen
said they left the Newman Center, the campus' Roman Catholic
ministry, over Father Greg Shaffer's views on homosexuality and
abortion.
According to The
GW Hatchet, the school's student-run newspaper, Legacy and
Bergen, the former president of Allied
in Pride, an LGBT student group, claim that Shaffer has advised
gay students to remain celibate for the rest of their lives, and that
he called gay relationships “unnatural and immoral” in a blog
post reacting to President Barack Obama's endorsement of marriage
equality last May.
“Every single rational person knows
that sexual relationships between persons of the same sex are
unnatural and immoral,” Shaffer
wrote. “They know it in their hearts. And, yet, they go
against what their hearts tell them when they try to argue for
same-sex relationships and 'gay marriage.'”
“We have to appeal to him. In the
end, he's the one preaching on Sunday. He's the one counseling these
students,” Legacy told the paper. “The money doesn't matter to
him, but when you see the faces of the people you're turning away,
you see the people who say, 'Oh, I would go to church all the time,
but I don't like Father Greg.' When you meet them at their level,
that's going to hit them harder because it's something they're going
to understand.”
Legacy and Bergen plan to file a formal
complaint with the university and hold prayer vigils outside the
Newman Center.