Catholic Church Threatens D.C. : Can Same-Sex Marriage Bill Or We Will Stop Providing Social Services
The Catholic Church is apparently not content with keeping its own members submissive to its dogma. Now its blackmailing the District of Columbia, threatening to stop providing social services unless D.C. reverses its decision to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.
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Of course if they do, we’ll hear for the next decade about how they were “forced to stop providing services because of gay marriage” (much like we’ve been hearing about how Catholic Charities in MA was “forced to stop providing adoption services in MA because of gay marriage”). We’ll hear that instead of the truth–they willingly chose to cease providing services rather than dump their personal bigotries toward LGBT citizens.
Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.
“If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”
No, Susan, it doesn’t mean you have to “be secular”. It just means you have to follow the same anti-discrimination laws everyone else does when providing services with taxpayer funds. If you want to operate solely according to your “deeply held religious beliefs” perhaps you should ditch those taxpayer dollars (which include funds from gay people, atheists, Pagans, Satanists and all sorts of other people you’d love to refuse to work with) and pass that church collection plate a few more times.
“The problem with the individual exemption is anybody could discriminate based on their assertion of religious principle,” Mendelson said. “There were many people back in the 1950s and ’60s, during the civil rights era, that said separation of the races was ordained by God.”
Indeed. And if we were to ban everything somebody’s “deeply held religious beliefs” and/or god said was wrong nothing would be legal. We can no longer allow human rights to be denied because one religious group or another objects. And we can no longer permit moral grandstanding by bigots to impede progress.
If the Catholic Church wants to pull the plug on its social service programs because it hates LGBT people then let it. There are plenty more providers to come in and take their place–providers who won’t be serving up a heap of smug superiority and bigotry with their services.
