The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops thinks firing someone because they are LGBT is bad. They also think a law to prevent that is even worse. In a statement to Congress after the Senate moved ahead on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the bishops, headed by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, came up a long list of arguments against the law, all of which given new meaning to the word “spurious.”

The bishops offer the usual platitudes about respecting everyone. “No one should be an object of scorn, hatred, or violence for any reason, including his or her sexual inclinations,” they write, confusing sexual orientation with a more loaded, and legally less accurate, word.

Once the formalities are aside, the bishops get down to the usual attacks. ENDA “elevates ‘sexual orientation’ discrimination … to the same and, until now unique, level as race discrimination, and above religion, sex, and national origin discrimination,” the bishops complain.

The letter also illustrates just how little understanding the bishops have of the LGBT community. They say the law “rejects the biological basis of gender,” denying the existence of transgender people. They also speak repeatedly of “same-sex attraction” and “same-sex conduct,” as if being gay was reduced to acts and was not an actual state of being.

But it wouldn’t be the Catholic Conference of Bishops without at least one outlandish belief, and here the Dolan clan delivers the goods. The terminology in the law is so vague–how vague is it?–it’s so vague that it “would encompass sexual conduct outside of marriage, thus legally affirming and specially protecting that conduct.”

Yes, ENDA enshrines adultery in the law! Possibly also two-handed pinochle, using the bishops’ impeccable logic.

Someone please remind these folks about Pope Francis’s warning that the Church has been too obsessive about gay issues. Obviously, they didn’t get the message.

(H/T: New Civil Rights Movement)