thomascwaters.com

The Catholic Church is really setting itself up for a real battle, and it is questionable if they can win this one or if it will do more harm to them in the long run. It is no surprise that the Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage, and their rationale has been the notion of religious freedom, and their first amendment rights.  Both the overall concept of religious freedom, and freedom of religion sound good, and this argument has served them pretty well up to this point.

The counter to this has been that Marriage Equality isn’t about religion, but rather about the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Still the argument sounds good, and has worked for the Catholic Church. The DC legislation which would recognize same-sex marriage, however, specifically provides exemptions so that religious organizations do not have to celebrate same-sex marriages. In this way, the law protects the Catholic Church’s right to follow their religious practices in the performance of their religious rites and and the life of the church.

Although the bill does exempt religious organizations from celebrating same-sex marriages it does not protect nor exempt them from recognizing it as employers or social service providers.

But the Catholic Church is more than an organization that performs religious duties. It partners with DC to provide public services, paid for, predominately by public/secular money. In addition, they are an employer, both in the realm of being a religious organization and as a vendor who provides public services with public money.

The current language of bill, the Archdiocese says, would require that they recognize the validity of same-sex marriage in the exension of insurance benefits to their spouses. So, as an employer, the archdiocese as well as its agencies would have to violate their tenets on gay-marriage in order to avoid costly litigation.

This may be a harder one for the Church to support. How is being a fair, law abiding employer counter to their “tenets” on Gay Marriage?  Where is the biblical or doctrinal justification for how the Church should act as an employer?

This law will require the Catholic Church to accept that there are positions on Gay Marriage other than the one that they hold, however, that really isn’t that much different from the way the Church accepts current laws regarding discrimination and homosexuality. Clearly the church knows that it already employs gays and lesbians. How is it that employing gays and lesbians does not violate their tenets?

Frankly I’m not sure why any gay or lesbian person would want to work for the Catholic Church, but we all deserve the right to decide who we want to work for. But, we still all deserve to be free from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.

Does the Catholic Church have the right to discriminate against employees who live together but who are not married? Does it have the right to discriminate against employees who masturbate or who have premarital sex? These too could be seen as violations of Church tenets. Yet, the Church isn’t threatening civil disobedience about these. Nor does the Catholic Church use these as criteria for determining who to social services paid for with public money.

By trying to claim the right to discriminate in employment, and the providing of public services with public money based on religious freedom and first amendment rights, the Church dilutes the real and meaningful separation of Church and State, and diminishes the power of Religious Liberty. The right to worship, and the right to treat your employees a certain way are very very different indeed. By conflating the two, the Church stands to destroy the very nature of worship, and this would be a great loss to the faithful followers of any religious tradition.

Archdiocese of Washington holds firm to stance on gay marriage.