Last week, I wrote of the Episcopal Church’s slow, but seemingly inevitable move toward blessing same-sex marriages — some thing I view as indicative of a positive societal change. The church has not done so yet, but it has opened the door for individual bishops to allow the priests that serve under them to go as far as blessing same-sex unions without calling them marriage.
It is, admittedly, a fine point, a bit of language parsing that was designed to maintain unity with the larger Anglican Union, of which the American church is a part.
Contrast this news story on the Catholic Church in New Jersey:
Catholic bishops in New Jersey have begun a campaign against same-sex marriage in anticipation of a possible vote on the issue by state legislators sometime after the November election.
The bishops directed Catholic priests throughout the state to distribute in parish bulletins last Sunday a 2,300-word letter opposing same-sex marriage. The priests are also expected to speak about the issue from the altar after Labor Day.
“The Catholic Church teaches today and has always and everywhere taught for 2,000 years that marriage is the union of one man and one woman,” the letter reads. “This great truth about marriage is not some obscure doctrinal fine point but a fact of human nature, recognized from time immemorial by people of virtually every faith and culture.”
I have no problem with the church holding the view that same-sex marriage violates church law and refusing to sanctify those unions or allow Catholics to participate in the official spiritual life of the church. That is for the Catholic Church and its believers to deal with.
The issue is what comes later in the letter, according to the Ledger:
The letter distributed last Sunday mentions Vatican writings and a verse straight from the catechism of the Catholic Church, a text that spells out official Catholic teachings.
The bishops reason that, given that God “bestowed” the gift of marriage on humanity, “governments, therefore, have a duty to reinforce and protect this permanent institution and to pass it on to future generations, rather than attempt to redefine it arbitrarily for transitory political or social reasons.”
The church, basically, wants the government to adopt and abide by church teachings, to acknowledge that marriage was a gift bestowed by god on humanity — something that would privilege the church and other religious denominations that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage over Americans who support the legalization of same-sex marriage. (That would be a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits Congress — and, by extension, thanks to the 14th Amendment, the states — from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”)
The dispute, when framed this way, makes it clear that the issue is not necessarily whether government should legalize same-sex marriage, but whether government should be involved in marriage at all and whether it should leave the designation of unions as marriage to the couples involved. Government then could focus on contractual unions between two people, which would be gender-neutral and would cover all of the current 1,000-plus rights and benefits that now go to married couples.
Health care, of course, could be addressed if we were to go with a single-payer system, but loads of others — access to hospitals, all federal benefits — are tied to the marriage label. Even in New Jersey, where civil unions are supposed to confer equal status, gay and lesbian couples have faced arbitrary refusals.
Basically, either government — and I’m talking about Congress and the president and the 45 states who have yet to do so — must legalize same-sex marriage or get out of the marriage business altogether.
Hank Kalet 
@Herb:We'll make a little L libertarian out of you yet!The gooferment has NO business being in the \”marriage business\” in the first place.We agree on that!