As I write this on the last Sunday in June 2016, New York is once again gearing up (or maybe bracing itself) for the annual "gay pride" festivities. This year, in the aftermath of the murders in Orlando, the general hope is that it all goes off all right and without a repetition of senseless violence.

The Orlando murders, though committed by a jihadist "crackpot" motivated by Islam, have evoked an interesting response from a few members of the Catholic clergy. The sermon I heard just this morning, in fact, exhorted Catholics to "look into their own hearts" and ask whether their religious convictions might, in some way, have contributed to a climate of violence against homosexuals. The ball may actually have been set rolling by Robert Lynch, the bishop of St. Petersburg, Florida. Bishop Lynch had the following to say in his June 13 newsletter:

…sadly, it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seeds of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence.

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego expressed a similar sentiment in his reflection of June 14, in which he states “This tragedy is a call for us as Catholics to combat ever more vigorously the anti-gay prejudice which exists in our Catholic community and in our country.”

Now, to the ordinary Joe Catholic sitting in the pews, these statements are baffling. They cannot mean that Catholics have any direct guilt for the Orlando killings. It is really hard to believe that Omar Mateen had "crusader" friends who egged him on to perform his evil deeds. Moreover, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of night raiders from the Knights of Columbus verbally smashing up gay bars and attitudinally beating up gays, to the cheers of the jihadist terrorist community.

So what do these remarks mean, cloaked as they are in ambiguity and innuendo? Could these priests be telling us that it is not all right to think that being "gay" is not all right? That it is a sin against charity to uphold the sanctity of true marriage? That it is wrong-headed to cling to the last tattered shreds of chastity left in our impoverished culture — the exercise of which virtue, one must add, many right-thinking and right-living homosexuals provide a courageous example? Or that the gay pride festivities are not an obscene and vulgar display, not of "gay pride," but of sexual license, profoundly demeaning to the participants, including our mostly "straight," craven political masters.

It may be that some of our priests need to take to heart the actual words of Christ, beginning with Matthew 5:37: "Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no. For whatever is more than these is from the evil one."