Well the reference is to a church that lost its tax exempt status because it didn’t want to be rented out for a gay wedding. So legally no, a church doesn’t have the right to marry whoever they want. They have to marry anyone who wants to get married apparently.
This isn’t really at issue though. It sounds like even the woman being interviewed on the OP’s NPR show concedes that churches will never be forced to marry gay couples (and honestly, even if they were, I doubt there’s a lot of gay couples clamoring to be married in a ceremony performed by an unwilling clergy).
The issue is that churches will have to interact with gay spouses in places outside the confines of the religious sphere. Like Church run adoption agencies and parks mentioned in post #3.
Guess he can always comisserate with the poor Catholic clerk who already has to choose between joining divorcees in their second weddings and his civil service job.
Being married in a pavilion owned by a church is different then being “married by the church”. And the Churches tax-exempt status for being a church wasn’t being threatened, their tax exempt status for owning a piece of property that they opened to the public was being threatened, because they weren’t holding it open to the public.
Did you read the whole article?
To avoic repeating myself, the background on Catholic Charities of Massachusetts’s adoption program. Note that the parent agency, Catholic Charities of Massachusetts, is still in existence and still doing good, just no longer arranging adoptions.
As for the Jersey shore church, they were renting their seaside wedding pavilion to the general public, for weddings, family reunions, and such. It was not a ‘church’ facility in the sense that it was available only for church-sponsored or -sanctioned events; it was a money-making proposition for the church. And the various civil rights acts have made it clear that you cannot hold a service (renting a motel room, for example) open to the general public except for members of a ‘suspect class’, like black people. They would have been within their rights to rent it only to members of their church, but when they undertook to make money on it by renting it to the public, they lost the privilege of specifying who may and may not rent it, except for legally valid reasons.
Simplicio, I believe the group you’re referring to is the Sea Scouts, one of several groups under a BSA-sponsored program that used to be called the Explorers but has since been rebranded, to a name I don’t recall.
Well, you’ll recall that big flap when the Roman Catholic Church lost its tax exempt status for refusing to marry divorcees.
By the way, as a committed Christian, my comments:
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Marriage is three distinct things: the commitment made by the two members of the marrying couple towards each other; a religious rite (sacrament in my belief system); and the legally codified social institution recognized by the state. It is possible to show instances of people being married by any one or two of these definitions but not by the other(s). France’s laws make that distinction very clear; ours tend to confute it. To abandon the perfectly good legal term ‘marriage’ to the churches is equivalent to allowing them to decide whether someone should be permitted to work on Sunday, or what the rights of a woman vis-a-vis a man should be.
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Gay marriage does not infringe on the religious rights of anyone. Rather it infringes on the Religious Right – specifically, their self-assumed role as arbitrator of public morality.
OK, I’ll stand up and say I don’t think a church should lose its tax-exempt status because it doesn’t want to host gay weddings.
Of course, that’s hardly rationale for maintaining a ban on gay marriage.
Sea Scouts are still out there - my son is looking into it after he earns his Eagle.
Sea Scouts have had some challenges, as they typically are allowed to lease a dock slip for $1 per year from the city to keep their boat. The smarter units have responded by opening up their boat to all comers to rent, but operating it as well for their Scouts.
The Newport Beach Seabase operates that way - any child can sign up for activities there. They also provide their materials to the Sea Scouts as well. So far this balance has kept them from losing their location.
The Methodists in New Jersey made the mistake of becoming a public accommodation - beyond the typical definition of a church. If they would have kept the pavilion for Methodist run events only, they might have been fine. They also would have needed to refuse any money from the state.
This is why I have argued against our congregation ever taking a penny from Bush’s Faith Based Initiatives. I don’t ever want to be told what to do.
They didn’t lose their tax-exempt status for their church, they lost for their “public recreation and conservation” area.
From the article in post 3:
Bolding mine.
This is sad. People should be able to discriminate in a not-for-profit adoption agency, as long as the market is served otherwise. Like if I wanted to give up my child for adoption and ensure that it goes to a Catholic family, I am unserved. (I’m not Catholic, just sayin’)
Maybe, but the article doesn’t address that kind of case. The question is whether or not the adoption agency should be able to discriminate against protected classes ability to adopt children, not the person looking to put their child up for adoption. For all I know,you can drop your kid off at an adoption agency and say “make sure he goes to a straight couple” and they can try to oblige your request. The article doesn’t say.
My understanding is that an adoption agency is, in fact, allowed to do that. What they can’t do is refuse to adopt to say, Jewish people, even if they have children whose natural parents don’t care what religion the adoptive parents practice.
Hang on a second.
Without any regard to the merit (or lack thereof) of any argument as to whether adoption agencies should be allowed to discriminate or not–
The closure of the MA catholic adoption agency had nothing to do with gay marriage. Every single news report I’ve found connects it to MA anti-discrimination laws–not to marriage.
Even Focus on the Family says so–and they would surely go after gay marriage if they could. http://www.citizenlink.org/FOSI/bioethics/adoptionpolicy/A000007970.cfm
Emphasis added by me.
Furthermore, the agency in question had placed children with gay couples for at least two decades (since well before gay marriage was legal in MA).
It’s a red herring. Stop using it to attack gay marriage.
Am I the only one cynical enough to think that they didn’t make a mistake? Thanks to their actions, the Religious Wrong now has a case that they can point to and very easily spin into “See? The evil liberals want to force churches to marry sodomites, against our right to religion!”. And even though it doesn’t hold together on close examination, it superficially looks like it holds together, which is all the Religious Wrong needs.
If it was that well planned, everybody’d be doing it. Churches would be managing to get themselves (or, well, their satellite facilities) shut down left and right, and would be using that to whip the entire country into a frothing uproar.
But, and isolated incident that’s not all that well known? Sounds to me like they seriously wanted the rental money…and then got themselves booted out of the rental business. Whoops.
The current tax free set-up was apparently agreed to in 1989 and saves the Methodists hundreds of thousands of dollars. I doubt that it was done so that in two decades they could spring a “gottcha” on couples trying to get gay-married.
Those Methodists are pretty tricky though. There’s a reason Hedley Lamarr wanted them in with the rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers and shit kickers.
The long and short of it is that the National Organization for Marriage (aka NOM [nom nom]) are lying liars who lie. As seen in their ridiculous “there’s a storm gathering” commercial, they are happy and willing to conflate any anti-discrimination laws or court rulings with same-sex marriage and spin them as affronts to religious freedom.
They also make mention of a “doctor in California who isn’t free to adhere to their faith” which was the North Coast Women’s Care case, in which a California fertility practice was found in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination laws when it refused to provide some but not all of the clinic’s various assisted reproductive therapies to Guadalupe Benitez, either because she was a lesbian, or because she was unmarried – because marriage was not available to her and her committed partner of many years. Either way, same sex marriage rights had nothing to do with why the court dinged the doctors and said “you can’t do that.”
No church is going to be sued for refusing to marry a gay couple any more than a church is going to be sued for refusing to marry a Hindu couple. It’s a complete red herring.
For those not familiar with that commercial-youtube.
I love their use of “rainbow coalition” and the obviously queer paw-paw (white beard guy (at :12). And is that Eldin from the Cosby Show?
Near as I can figure from the commercial, Christian doctors from California are losing their licenses unless they enter into a gay marriage in New Jersey, or something. It’s vague “bad stuff’s gonna happen, man” crap that makes no comments on exactly what the bad stuff is exactly how it’s gonna happen. And the graphics scream “made by and for pedantic straight conservatives”. Everybody is well dressed of course so as to convey “we’re not rednecks, white supremacists, and undereducated Fundamentalists, we just rely heavily on their support” and it’s multicultural for the “Tituba look… I has non-white people t’inks like me do!” message to reach out.