Obama Invited Fired Gay Catholic School Teacher and Her ‘Wife’ to Meet Pope
The Obama administration has made another potentially incendiary invite for the pope’s visit to the White House Wednesday, inviting a Catholic school teacher who lost her job after marrying her same-sex partner. Her wife will be coming as well.
Margie Winters taught at Waldron Mercy Academy until June of this year, when she was fired after parents complained about her same-sex marriage.
The gay-rights group Human Rights Campaign obtained the White House tickets for Winters and her wife Andrea Vettori, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The group has promoted the story of Winters and Vettori, releasing a video last week that uses them to pressure the Catholic Church to accept gay marriage. Current Catholic doctrine regards homosexual acts as sinful and defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
In the video, Winters reads a letter she wrote to Francis in July where she asks him to “intervene on our behalf and countless other faithful Catholics so that we may not be condemned to live a life exiled from a church we so love and want to serve.”
Philadelphia’s archbishop, Charles Chaput, has defended Winters’ termination as an act of “character and common sense.”
Winters isn’t the first person invited to Francis’s White House reception who appears to reflect White House opposition to Catholic teachings. Others invited to the private reception include gay Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson, Catholic transgender activist Matteo Williams, and Sister Simone Campbell, a nun who lobbied for Obamacare’s passage despite its provisions funding abortion and forcing Catholic organizations to provide birth control.
An unnamed Vatican official has expressed displeasure with the Obama administration’s guest list, saying they feared Francis would be photographed alongside dissidents in an apparent endorsement of their activities. The official also expressed displeasure that while so many dissidents were invited, nobody appears to represent America’s anti-abortion movement, which has close ties to the Catholic Church.
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