Goodbye Old Paint

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At least six Catholic parishes in Washington state have ignored the Seattle Archbishop’s call to gather signatures for a referendum repealing the state’s recently-enacted marriage equality law, calling the effort “hurtful and seriously divisive in our community.”

…Opinion polls have consistently shown that Catholics reject the Church’s opposition to marriage equality, with nearly three-quarters of Catholics favoring “either allowing gay and lesbian people to marry (43%) or allowing them to form civil unions (31%).

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The Roman Catholic church is taking no active roles in fundraising, staffing, advertising, or campaigning against marriage equality in Maine.

Bishop Richard Malone, the sect’s top-ranking official in Maine, said on Friday, March 2 that his goal now is only to re-train the wayward 25% of Maine’s 187,306 Catholics. He said that the church “doesn’t want to impose a law or belief on anyone,” especially non-Catholic citizens, who comprise 86% of Maine residents, and 77% of all Americans. Maine voters will decide by ballot in November whether to write same-gender marriage into state law…

Such changes are not made independently, and are always coordinated with higher church officials. The Diocese of Maine, located in Portland, is a corporation sole which reports to the Ecclesiastical Province of Boston, located in Boston, Massachusetts, which includes the states of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

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“No American’s right to marry should be subjected to a veto from aggressive and well-funded religious groups,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. “Our nation is a democracy, not a theocracy. Our laws should reflect equality and fairness, not discrimination and intolerance.”

Added Lynn, “Opponents of same-sex marriage have been unable to muster any arguments other than it offends their theology. We have a secular government, and dogma should not and cannot be transformed into law.”

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“Marriage is, and has always been through human history, a union of a man and woman,” he writes, neglecting to mention the times when it has been the unions of a man and various women — and the times when the most relevant thing about a marriage was its unification of families or clans or tribes or fiefdoms, not the stability it afforded a possibly procreative relationship. And did human history end in April 2001? That’s when the Netherlands legalized gay marriage. Today gay marriage is legal in 10 countries, as well as specific jurisdictions in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil. This is all very recent, but it isn’t as if these laws are likely to be repealed. Today’s 10-year-olds have never known a world without gay marriage, and if Rick Santorum is elected this year and in 2016, those kids will start voting before the end of his second term. Put another way, the strongest argument the anti-gay marriage folks have will evaporate in a generation.”