Politician as Person of Faith, Part 97

In this blog post from the Sun, Matthew Brown shares that Archbishop O'Brien urged Martin O'Malley not to support gay marriage based on O'Malley's Catholic faith. This is yet another example of the difficulties presented by separating church and state. (Not that I'm against the separation, of course!)

How does a political person handle this? On the one hand, I look to my faith to shape my decisions and to make me a moral person. And the church has a long tradition of working toward consistency and comprehensiveness in terms of a moral belief system. On the other hand, we have a separate way of judging what is right and wrong in the public sphere, and sometimes that moral code overlaps with religious views, and sometimes not. The US legal system's "belief system" is very much rooted in modernity and the rights of individuals, while those aren't always the first priority for different Christian worldviews.

I'm glad that O'Malley decided in favor of the commonly held view of individual rights.

On a side note, the language of "redefining marriage" that Archbishop O'Brien most likely assumes that marriage is not the union of two equals. Here's a piece from Slate on how gay marriage is good for straight women and men's equality.

Same-Sex Marriage and Church Freedoms

On Friday, Martin O'Malley is planning to make an announcement on his strategy for moving same-sex marriage forward in Maryland. Which is a good thing, for sure. I think the near miss we had this year in the legislature shows how important it is to have strong support for the legislative change.

It makes me sad, though that the main objectors have been people of faith.

There's the old, sad story of pitting black people against gay people. A few problems with this. First of all, it's not as if there weren't any LGBT African Americans out there. Second of all, when you look at something like Proposition 8 in California, which ended same-sex marriage with the same election that brought in Obama, the first story was, "oh, Obama voters did this." The truth is more complicated than that.

It's frustrating, though, to see religious people arguing that they don't want to offer the same services to same-sex couples as they do to straight couples, and that therefore Maryland shouldn't offer same-sex marriage. In the fallout from same-sex marriage in Washington, DC, Catholic Charities stopped doing adoptions and offering partner benefits to their employees. That's a pretty steep price to pay to keep gay couples from having something straight couples were previously able to have. I think it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face. (On the other hand, here is some interesting news about Catholic Charities USA.)

For a long time, there has been a reluctant kind of truce between civic life and religious beliefs. The same-sex marriage conversation seems to be another opportunity to see where the fault lines are when you try to separate religion from the public square. Yahoo....