thomascwaters.com

The linked article is not about Marriage, Gay or Straight, but as I read it, I started to think about why is t that the Catholic Church itself is such a big player  in the battle againstMarriage Equality. The snarky reply is to write a blog post about how the Church as an institution wishes to protect itself from disclosure of child sex abuse embarrassment, but thinks it has the moral authority to decide who can share their lives together as a couple. But snarky, doesn’t really get us very far, so I’m not taking that approach.

But the article does prompt an interesting question for me concerning Constitutional rights that I want to explore briefly. I’s sum up the issue by the question, who owns Marriage?

A Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut has invoked the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in a request to the US Supreme Court to let it keep clergy sexual abuse documents under seal, a move that appeared to contradict the church’s recent pledges of openness.

In its request for review, the diocese contends that it cannot be sued for assigning priests with a history of sexual abuse because such placements are ecclesiastical decisions. It also says documents dealing with the assignments are protected by religious privileges in the First Amendment.

The First Amendment has six parts: Prohibit Congress from making any law that:

• Establishes a national religion, or the preference of one religion over another.
• Free exercise of religion.
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of the press
• Right to assembly
• Right to petition

There isn’t any way to understand the diocese’s claim except to argue that “ecclesiastical decisions” are a part of the right to free exercise of religion, and this gets me to the question of ownership of Marriage.

But as an aside, it is interesting that the two primary denominations spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight Marriage Equality, are the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church- each connected to the First Amendment. The Mormon church is connected in the ways in which this amendment has been used to prosecute polygamy, and the Catholic church arguing that it applies to keeping records secret.

If Marriage is understood as a rite of the church, then what is the government doing involved in any way, by issuing marriage licenses? If marriage licenses are a role for the state, and are a civil regulation, then what is the church doing by interfering in who is allowed to have a marriage license? The church has every right to determine who it will or will not perform a religious rite, but every couple that meets the state requirements should be able to get a marriage license.

Another issue has been nagging at me since I started writing this however. When John Maher interviewed John Moyer, Moyer makes a comment about the way the Constitution has been morphed to protect corporations when it was designed to protect individuals.  Do cases like the Bridgeport  Conn. diocese demonstrate that the idividuals is no longer protected but the large Catholic corporation is?  Too much more to go into here, but still on my mind.

Conn. diocese appears to break church pledge of openness – The Boston Globe.