My birth defect was caused by my mother's drug addiction when she was carrying me. They didn't realize in the 40s that drugs and babies don't mix.

I was slapped into a cast the day I was born. Now 70 plus years later, I still have that tiny cast in my box of memories. That aging white plaster-of-Paris cast, which is becoming fragile with age, is smaller than my Smartphone.

Gore Vidal, the American literary critic and gay activist might be credited for having invented the term 'gay' when he was an influential writer and thinker in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. He did it to protect his homosexual friends whom he thought, would be protected by and benefit from a new image.

As we attempt to develop an authentic Christian response to assisted suicide and other forms of medical killing, we need to start with an understanding of creation, and in particular of the created moral order, the moral principles that God has embedded into the structure of the universe. God did not just create the physical stuff of the universe, atoms and molecules and photons. He also created a hidden moral order, like the grain imprinted in a piece of wood.

That journey led Kaltenbach and his family into years of pro-LGBTQ activism where he often encountered hate and anger from some who called themselves Christians -- people who left him feeling in his early years as though he'd never want to be part of the faith.