According to the Times, Chaput said that anyone voting for Kerry was "cooperating in evil" and needed "to go to confession". After the interview, Chaput criticized The New York Times for the way it construed his remarks. The archdiocese criticized the article as being "heavily truncated and framed" and posted a full transcript of it. He stopped responding to the paper's inquiries for six years, in part because he believed the Times had misrepresented him. Chaput was seen by some critics as "part of a group of bishops intent on throwing the weight of the Church into the elections". In public comments, his linkage of the Eucharist to the policy stances of political candidates and their supporters were seen as a politicization of moral theology. In 2009, Chaput criticized a "spirit of adulation bordering on servility" toward President Barack Obama, remarking that "in democracies, we elect public servants, not messiahs". He said that Obama tried to mask his record on abortion rights and other issues with "rosy marketing about unity, hope, and change". Chaput also dismissed the notion that Obama was given a broad mandate, saying that he was elected to "fix an economic crisis" and not to "retool American culture on the issues of marriage and the family, sexuality, bioethics, religion in public life, and abortion". Chaput said that the 2016 American presidential election offered Americans the "worst choice in 50 years". In his view, both Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were "deeply flawed" candidates. Gun control Following the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Chaput wrote that he supports background checks for purchasers of firearms, but added this comment:"Only a fool can believe that 'gun control' will solve the problem of mass violence. The people using the guns in these loathsome incidents are moral agents with twisted hearts. And the twisting is done by the culture of sexual anarchy, personal excess, political hatreds, intellectual dishonesty, and perverted freedoms that we've systematically created over the past half-century". LGBT rights Chaput opposes same-sex marriage and questioned the upbringing of children of same-sex couples. He has said that same-sex couples cannot show children that their parents love each other in the same way that opposite-sex couples can. In 2015, Chaput supported the dismissal of Margie Winters, the director of religious education at Waldron Mercy Academy in Merion Station, Pennsylvania. Winters had married her