The Catholic Church in the United States and globally, can ordinarily count on praise for its services to and teachings about the poor, and jeers for its interventions about sex, marriage and abortion. Now, it appears as though the Church can kiss even this limited approval goodbye.  The Archdiocese of Washington DC has announced that its charitable institutions will no longer be able to partner with the District of Columbia’s (DC) government due to the absence of conscience protection for religious actors in DC’s proposed “Religious Freedom [sic] and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009.”  This bill would redefine marriage as the “legally recognized union of 2 people…regardless of gender.”  The bill fails to protect individual religious persons or enterprises who serve the public, from cooperating with same sex marriages. It also has the effect of requiring Catholic institutions to provide the same benefits to employees who enter a same-sex union, as those provided to an employee with an opposite-sex marriage.  The accreditations and/or licenses of Catholic educational institutions, and professionals are also at stake.

As a result of the DC City Council’s determination to redefine marriage, the Archdiocese of Washington has announced that the diocese has no choice but to withdraw from its partnerships with the government, while continuing to provide charitable services independently, with funds raised privately and directly from individual Catholics within the diocese. Following more than a few choice words about the Catholic Church – words like “discriminatory,” and “childish,” -- DC lawmakers have indicated that the Church and its opinions should avoid letting the door hit them on the way out; supporters of the bill claim that DC can easily find other charities to pick up the slack without a break in the delivery of services.  They bluntly accuse the Church of turning its back on the poor, using the poor as a “bargaining chip,” and sacrificing the neediest on the altar of its disdain for homosexuals.

The irrationality and baselessness of these assertions are breathtaking.  First, take the claimed disdain for homosexuals. The local diocese, the national bishops’ conference and both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have taken pains to express unequivocally the Church’s support for the equal dignity of homosexual persons. Just one month ago, Washington’s Archbishop Wuerl issued a “Pastoral Message for Homosexual Catholics in the Archdiocese of Washington” in which he wrote: “Our support of marriage is not meant to discriminate against any individual or family. The Catechism of the Catholic Church upholds the human dignity of every person and condemns any form of unjust discrimination (2358).”[1] Of course, the Church continues to teach that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. To claim that this is tantamount to a bias against the persons of homosexuals, however, is like saying that the Church is biased against human beings per se because it teaches that all human beings are inclined by original sin toward sinful acts. It is logically and pastorally possible in both cases to “hate the sin but love the sinner.”

Second, there has been and will be no “turning its back on the poor.” The Church will not cease providing services to the poor with its own private funds. This was confirmed explicitly in a public message by the diocese.  No cutbacks are proposed. The millions of dollars collected annually from individual Catholics in the diocese will continue to be collected and used to care for the neediest persons in DC, most of whom, incidentally, are not Roman Catholic.  Nor is there any indication that the DC government’s funding for the poor will dry up or that any of its social services will be discontinued.

This firestorm, then, is not about withdrawing or shrinking services to the poor. It is about vehement opposition to the Catholic Church’s teaching about marriage.  Those who would redefine marriage insist that relationships which may give rise to children merit no special recognition and support from the law and the community; the Catholic Church insists that they need and ought to have this recognition and support.

Given especially all that is empirically known today about children’s profound needs for loving communion with their parents, and their need for the contributions of both fathers and mothers, separately and together, there is no warrant whatsoever for moving law and policy in a direction which ignores children or even goes so far as to insist that they are irrelevant to marriage.  Just the opposite momentum is needed today.  For far too long, family law has moved and changed so as to forward adults’ interests -- in sexual license, in easy divorce, in securing babies by even risky technological means. After decades of experimenting with this model, sociologists, psychologists and even some lawmakers, are beginning to understand that neither adults’ nor children’s freedom have been advanced by the “adults-first” trajectory. The sufferings of children whose parents never married or whose parents divorced, have been measured and named by eminent sociologists in academic journals.  After decades of such research, myriad proposals to bring children’s needs back into focus are beginning to gain a hearing in state legislatures across the country.  In this context, laws proposing to redefine marriage to include same-sex partners represent a tremendous step backward.  They communicate that marriage is purely about conferring benefits upon adults.  One can hear this plainly in the words of the first U.S. court to legalize same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts declared that marriage is about the state providing recognition to an individual’s “deeply personal commitment to another human being” and about a “highly public celebration of ideals,” such as companionship, intimacy, fidelity and family. [2] Children do not feature in this description.

The District of Columbia should fear further stripping marriage of its association with children.  The sufferings experienced by children in the nation’s capital as a result of an “adults first” philosophy of sex and marriage are legion.  DC’s nonmarital birth rates exceed 58%. The city’s children suffer the accompanying ills of poverty, high crime rates and low educational attainment.  DC’s adults and children also suffer high rates of abortion, nonmarriage, divorce, and cohabitation.  

Members of the DC City Council who support redefining marriage might silently worry that if the Catholic Church exits its partnership with the city, DC will have lost the talents that only an inspired and experienced charity can bring. They might worry about the “optics” of losing an ally well-known for its local, national and global generosity to the poorest of the poor.  If they could bring themselves to think more integrally, or if they could bring themselves to think about the long run welfare of children and families, these same council members would also fear losing the collaboration of a body so deeply committed to the long run well-being of children, that it is willing to be persecuted in the court of public opinion for standing up for them.


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Notes

[1] See http://www.adw.org/family/pdf/09Marr-DWW_msg_1006.pdf.

[2] Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health 440 Mass. 309, 322 (2003).

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