and as an aside, I was told by some church officers that in an abundance of caution, they block off their parking lots one day a year to make sure no one can claim that it is be default public access. The church is maintaining control even of their parking lot. I don’t know how common the practice is, this particular church allowed it was being extra careful. This was several years ago.
First Congo in Memphis, my former congregation, has been open and affirming of gays for 20 years. But for years TV they only did marriages of members: that is, at least one of the couple had to be a member. This was regardless of orientation, but I think the reason was to keep from being overwhelmed, since hardly any other church in town would do SSMs. I also think the pastors would officiate at non-member weddings done elsewhere.
nm
The first wedding I officiated was for friends who were unable to find a church willing to solemnize their vows. The couples numerous piercings, tattoos, and atheistic beliefs never came up; it was the fact they’d cohabited for years and did not belong to a church that stood in the way.
When an acquaintance and his girlfriend had their first child (while cohabitating) her very traditional catholic father had a little chat and strongly suggested they get married. He said that during the counselling beforehand, the priest said “are you really serious about this marriage, or should I send you to the United Church down the street?”
OTOH, I know my step-sister got married in our (Catholic) parish even though she and her now-ex lived a long way away, because that’s where her mother went to church. So… all rules are flexible.
This is assuming the church is acting as a church, and not as the owner/operator of a rental property. It is not inconceivable to me that a church could own an event space and rent that space as a business rather than as an accommodation to church members. While the Church proper can act as a private club, the rental property may not enjoy the same legal protections.
Actually, despite the naive appearance of my question, I realize that a couple can’t just waltz into a church and throw their own private party. I was asking about a church’s tendency or ability to discriminate against a couple who wanted to get married, and what grounds they might use for that stance.
Strictly speaking, the word “discriminate” means that the church draws distinctions for various reasons, and doesn’t mean that those reasons are bad.
In other words, a church that forbids a brother and sister from marrying each other on their grounds can fairly be said to be discriminating against brother-sister couples. A church that forbids couples from marrying each other on their grounds unless one party to the wedding is a member of that faith is also discriminating.
But the use fo the word has come to have a somewhat negative connotation.
So: when you use the word, do you mean it in a neutral way, or in a pejorative way?
That’s what happened when my brother married a Catholic in her family’s church. But he was also required to sign some form agreeing to raising the kids as Catholic.
Conservative and Orthodix rabbis will not perform a wedding unless both people are Jewish. Reform rabbis require only that one be. In my experience, Jewish weddings do not take place in a synagogue. At least I have never been to such a wedding. I was at a very orthodox wedding a few years ago that took place in a hall down the street from a synagogue and probably owned by the membership and performed by their rabbi.
All the churches I’ve attended (Evangelical Free and independent with Baptist / Christian Missionary alliance leanings) required either both parties to be either Christians or non-Christians (Apparently Christian marrying a non-Christian is specifically called out as sinful in the new testament).
It’s can be assumed they’d say “forget it” to a gay couple.
That’s me! 
I had to go to Catholicism classes - what amounted to one-on-one instructions with the priest at his house … and very interesting it proved. Turns out the priest was an expert in early Gnostic heresies - and when he found I was interested in this hobby of his, that’s all we would talk about. 
I dunno how the dispensation stuff worked, if we needed that it was all handled without any input from me.
The Jewish wedding takes place under a canopy (chuppah) but there is no requirement that this be in temple, or indeed even indoors; Ashkenazi tradition in particular holds that the canopy should be under the open sky.
There is court precedent about church owned property essentially being regarded as a public accommodation. A New Jersey case, Bernstein v Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association (pdf link) is on point.
A Methodist church owned a seaside pavilion which it had rented out for weddings and other events. A same-sex couple was refused rental because they wished to hold a commitment ceremony there. The State charged the church “with unlawful public accommodation discrimination based on civil union status, within the meaning of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (N.J.S.A. 10:5-1, et seq.) and specifically N.J.S.A. 10:5-4 and 10:5-12(f).”
The New Jersey court ruled in favor of the State, and thus the couple. The church appealed and their appeal was summarily dismissed. The church appealed again, to theUS Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the summary dismissal was affirmed in part and remanded.
Jewish congregations will often impose their own rules in addition to the rules of their stream of Judaism. For example, Reform Judaism permits marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew, but some congregations won’t permit interfaith weddings in the synagogue (or they may demand that their rabbi refrain from officiating at interfaith weddings altogether as a condition of employment).
Like churches, synagogues usually give priority to members when scheduling the use of facilities for weddings. Non-members pay for the use of the space; members may pay a reduced fee or no fee.
If the church happens to be defined as being a Mission, they may choose to celebrate weddings in which neither party is a Catholic (I know they were doing this in Japan back when Padre Arrupe was in his last years of being the SJ General - he renounced the position in 1983).
I once rented a bar/hall from The American Legion for a huge party. I was not a member. I was told the fee for non-members was $550, and that $50 would be returned to me if the facilities were cleaned up afterwards. My budget could just barely handle that.
However, I was told that use of the facilities was $35 for members , with no seperate cleaning deposit. Membership for a year was $25 and there were no stipulations on who could be a member. I handed him $60 cash.
FYI, it’s also common for churches to restrict funeral services. My dad didn’t want my mom’s funeral to be in his local parish where they were members (it’s in such a dangerous area that he didn’t want family members going there). However he couldn’t find any other parishes in the area (south burbs of Chicago) willing to do it because she wasn’t in their parish. He ended up not having a church funeral service for her, but somehow imported a priest to the funeral home for some kind of half-assed thing that was superficially similar to a service.
Iggy makes an excellent point. If a US church is in the habit of leasing out its chapel to the general public, then the usual protections of law against anti-discrimination apply. They are no different than a restaurant and such.
But if they limit weddings to members, then they can claim exemption to anti-discrimination laws.
Hence, a lot of churches have fixed rules restricting who can marry there.
The chapel at Emory University was at the center of one of these disputes in the late 90s. Emory wanted to allow gay commitment ceremonies. But Emory is affiliated with the Methodist Church and the Church told them to knock it off. Emory pointed out that they couldn’t discriminate to the public since the chapel could be used by people of all faiths. Emory won out, but had to restrict, at least at that time, the people performing the weddings to Emory chapel affiliated clergy. (Which included at the time a Rabbi who did perform commitment ceremonies.)
I agree …
If a pastor from some small neighborhood church just putters around doing churchy stuff like writing sermons, paying the electric bill and performing marriages within the church … and receives a salary for this … then he is acting on the chruch’s behalf. A same-sex couple can’t just waltz in and demand he marries them.
On the other hand … if the pastor is offering this service to the general public for a fee … then he is acting as a business … and as a business, he would have to marry the same-sex couple under the variety of anti-discrimination laws … at least the pastor could not refuse because they were same-sex … that doesn’t mean he couldn’t refuse for some other reason that doesn’t run afoul of anti-discrimination laws.
An important difference … the pastor can refuse a same-sex couple if they insist on packing AK-47’s during the ceremony … but the refusal is because of the AK-47’s, not because they’re same-sex.
When I was in high school, the synagogue I attended shared a large parking lot with a Lutheran Church (worked out really well, other than that odd year when Yom Kippur was on a Sunday; then we rented the parking lot from the realtor across the street). One year, we were fire-bombed by some neo-Nazis, and while our edifice was being rebuilt (you learn who your friends are-- a lot of churches in town made donations, and the Islamic congregation in town did too), the Lutheran Church lent us a chapel they had in addition to their main edifice, for our services. It was a tight squeeze, but it was wonderful of them, because they took all their books out of it, and hung a cloth over the cross they had at the front, so it looked totally neutral.
Some Jewish weddings take place in the sanctuary, because there are already lots of seats there, and there is usually already a social hall as part of the building.
IME, Modern Orthodox weddings, specifically, don’t take place in the sanctuary, because the sanctuary has a mechitza, or a separate area for the women to sit, and the couple doesn’t want genders to sit separately at the wedding, which is permitted at a Modern Orthodox wedding.
I’ve only been to one Haredi wedding, and it wasn’t in the family’s hone sanctuary, but their sanctuary would not have been big enough to accommodate all the guests, so that may have been the reason. Men and women sat separately.
There’s no requirement that a rabbi officiate, either, just that there be three witnesses who are Jews. Usually, those end up being the maid of honor, the best man, and the rabbi, but it doesn’t have to be that way. My congregational rabbi was 8 1/2 months pregnant at the date we wanted for our wedding, but as it happened, we knew a Jewish woman who was also ordained as a UU minister (not working as one at the time, though), and she agreed to officiate at our service. The congregation board had to approve it, since they had to approve all uses of the sanctuary that were not services conducted by the rabbi, but since it was happening because of the possibility of the rabbi going into early labor (and she didn’t really want to do it anyway, I don’t think, although she did all our pre-wedding counseling), it was no big deal.
Our synagogue has this rule for the rabbi, although they will approve the use of the space for interfaith marriages as long as the Jewish person is a member of the synagogue. The officiant has to be a civil authority, not a religious authority from another faith (except in my special case where my officiant happened to be Jewish, and ordained as a UU minister-- if a Jew were ordained as a secular minister, like the atheist “pastor” who performed my brother’s ceremony, they’d probably let him in too).
Yeah, and every synagogue I’ve ever belonged to makes it cheaper to join the congregation for a year than to pay for the space at the non-member rate. The member rate usually amounts to a big tip for the janitor.