I'm wondering what exactly forces religious institutions to recognize marriages (same or opposite sex) or civil unions now? I know of no such requirement. The fact that we often DO, and often function to celebrate and bless them, doesn't mean that we MUST.

Tom,

The kinds of thing I read conservative Christian sources predicting seem to focus on employment related issues and possible interpretations of anti-gay exegesis in writing, teaching or preaching as hate speech. The concerns frame 'the gay agenda' as a move that lays grounds for an attack on churches' Constitutional freedoms in the First Amendment.

In employment issues they warn of

- anti-discrimination laws around hiring gay people, so the fear that the government will tell churches and church institutions that they cannot discriminate against people in civil partnerships or gay unions. Versions of this imagined threat range from church forced to hire an out gay or partnered gay pastor by court action to the question of who they hire (or may discriminate against) for non-religious support staff functions.
and the other evident, hot issue is
- health insurance mandates (already fearful of universal health care and the path to 'socialized medicine). Here the threat they warn of is laws that would require anti-gay churches to provide the gay bookkeeper or janitor their mega-church was forced to hire with partner or family health care benefits if they provide health care benefits to employees.

Some of these same voices claim that Matthew Shepherd's death or the shootings at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church were not hate crimes and that the hate crime laws are only interest group lobbying.

The fear this kind of conservative church voice and lobbyist express about legal compulsions around any civil legislation or court decision for gay rights seem to rest on a lot of hypothetical tightening of anti-discrimination law.

In California at least churches (and also secular employers under a certain size) are exempted from a lot of employment practice laws, including anti-discrimination laws.

What Blankenhorn and Ruach's suggested compromise touches is the broader evangelical and conservative shift, people who want to be (as they perceive it) Biblical but whose consciences reject hostility toward gay people. My impression of their proposed compromise is that would make sense to people who are already making sense and would drive the most stridently conservative (who are also the most fearful and most condemning of 'the gay agenda') really nuts.

Donald Schell

Sounds like a bad compromise to me... One thing my bishop, who is gay (not Bp Robinson, I am not Episcopalian), has brought up repeatedly with me on the question of marriage is that pulling the rug of marriage qua marriage out from under same-sex couples is not equal rights. It's the same thing that was done culturally to African Americans at the end of Jim Crow, even in the north. White Americans stopped using honorifics and largely switched to first names even with strangers — at just the moment when Black Americans should have been accorded the honor of being called Mr Jackson or Ms Brown.

So switching to a much weaker word culturally to describe the rights we confer on same-sex couples feels like we're watering down the entire institution because we don't want to commit to treating gay couples as equal to straight ones.

On top of that, Fr Schell brings up an excellent point. While many of the "protections" anti-gay religious groups want are already accorded them in the Constitution, making these demands seem like a cry for America to coddle bigotry and treat it as respectable, there are very real concessions here that are simply unacceptable. It's fine if Main Street Megachurch wants to discriminate against gays and lesbians when hiring a pastor, but it is absolutely unacceptable for them to offer their straight bookkeeper's partner medical insurance while denying it to their same sex partnered janitor.

I appreciate a lot of the writing Rauch has done on this subject. His article making a conservative case for same-sex marriage in (I believe) The New Republic a few years ago was a tour de force. But this feels a bit like one fairly privileged member of an oppressed group making painful concessions for the less fortunate other members of his group — not like a genuine solution to the culture war, which should be more about solving the problems of regular people (people like the late Lt. Laurel Hester and her partner) and less about clever arguments made by pundits and think tank fellows.

Chris Tessone

This so-called reconciliation is morally wrong first because it would allow faith groups to discriminate against LGBTs in hiring and leasing out their facilities. For example, a religious employer could fire an employee who civilly married a same-sex spouse. Under current law, no faith group is forced to marry particular couples. Civil marriage is a purely civil contract which has nothing to do with religious marriage. Secondly, it is wrong because it would single out a particular group, same-sex couples who have married or joined in civil unions, for separate and unequal treatment. Their marriages and civil unions would be recognized as federal civil unions, while legally married sex-discordant couples would have their marriages recognized by the federal government as full marriages. They offer no reason for singling out same-sex couples other than their claim that the 1996 federal defense of marriage act (which says states may not recognize marriages of same-sex couples from other jurisdictions and the federal government cannot recognize marriages of same-sex couples). It is not clear that the federal defense of marriage act would allow the federal government to convert a legal marriage of same-sex couple into a federal civil union because that would be considered recognizing the marriage.

It would be easier for Congress to repeal the 1996 defense of marriage act and return the whole marriage business to the states. The federal government would simply recognize valid marriages.

Giving faith groups, especially those who receive federal funding, carte blanche to practice discrimination is a bad idea. The establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could not be harmonized with this sham reconciliation.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage.

And what of those states which not only don't grant such rights, but have bans written into their constitutions? What then?

Are we supposed to "limp between two opinions", a "house divided against itself"? [I could swear certain religious types warned against these two!]

Any "compromise solution" which does not grant functionally equal rights in all 50 states (regardless of whether it's called marriage or civil union at the Federal level) is a NON-STARTER.

[Particularly at THIS time, when we all may become state-to-state migrants, in search of our next job! Speaking personally. :-/]

JC Fisher

Posted for the Rev. Sara Flynn:

What this proposal is is really a surrender. Conservatives know they are losing the battle even in spite of Prop 8, and are suing for the best terms possible in the face of inevitable defeat.

What if a similar proposal were put on the table about Interracial Marriage which at one time was prohibited in 40 plus States? And most people were opposed to and thought it was not only a bad idea for the white race, but also against the plan of creation. Which was a ton of whooee as anyone could see just by looking around. If such an idea had been accepted we would still have anti-miscegnation laws on the books!

Frederick Douglas responded to the complaint by moderates that Abolitionists were stirring up too much controversy over slavery and that a more gradual approach was needed. White Moderate clergy said the same thing when Dr. King was cooling his heels in the Birmingham Jail.

Douglas is reported to have replied to the Moderates of his time: "Some people want rain without thunder." Dr. King responded by saying "The right time for justice is always now."

Gay and lesbian people should not bargain away their right to full equality in this society for the sake of a false and unjust peace. There is no need to make a bargain with the devil for the sake of second hand citizenship in our own country. We should see this proposal as really a recognition by the Right that they are ultimately going to lose this issue, and not be deterred from finishing what we have begun at such cost and effort.

Rev. Sarah Flynn
Burlington, VT

Talk about "special rights"! I have no problem with a church teaching whatever doctrine or moral theology it desires; I even have no difficulty in a religious institution having the right to refuse to provide a service it deems contrary to its moral values. But it seems that this "compromise" opens the way not for denying services so much as denying people. For example, could an RC hospital -- under this thinking -- restrict visitation and determination rights for a gay partner of a patient? And they could do it quite "innocently" by simply restricting such rights to "spouses" -- this then becomes restriction of rights by definition.

In general, it is my impression that the law that give "special rights" to religious bodies refer to things they can do with their own membership -- not things they can impose on others.

When ideology interferes with human rights we tread on dangerous ground -- covered, sadly, with many footprints.

Exempting faith groups from the law could be a very bad precedent for property disputes such as the recent one in San Diego, where the court ruled they would follow neutral values, meaning they would not look at religious doctrine but simply property issues. The court recognized the validity of the Dennis Canon as clearly intending that parish property is intended to be held in trust for the Episcopal Church.

Any breaching of the wall between church and state could undermine the Dennis Canon and give ammunition to breakaway parishes to argue on religious grounds that they are doing God's work by breaking off and taking the property. The Episcopal Church is doing well under the current laws and doesn't need special rights which could be used against it.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Fr. Haller hit on my main concern. Not to mention, these "private" religious hospitals often receive a lot of public funding. Now, if they're willing to shut off that spigot, let's talk turkey. But in lieu of that, I can not only imagine such situations as he describes. I know they've happened right here in California. Denial of spousal visitation as well as denial of treatment.