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 Archbishop Sartain |
 Bishop Cupich |
 Bishop Tyson |
 Auxiliary Bishop Elizondo |
“Registered domestic partners in Washington State already have legal equality with married couples, and they possess all the legal rights and benefits of marriage.” This is the outright lie being promoted by the Roman Catholic bishops of Washington state and Preserve Marriage Washington, opponents of Referendum 74.
Referendum 74 is a question on the Nov. 6 ballot asking voters to “approve” or “reject” the state’s new law — passed by the legislature with bipartisan majorities and signed by Gov. Gregoire — that allows same-sex couples the freedom to get a civil marriage license.
The bishops’ statement is clearly false because if domestic partners had the same legal rights as married couples, they would be able to obtain civil marriage licenses and call their legal contract “marriage”. Yet this legal equality will be denied same-sex couples unless voters approve Referendum 74 on Nov. 6.
The bishops also refuse to honestly address the reality that people with sub-equal statuses like domestic partnerships are not treated equally in the real world. Marriage Fact Check sums it up nicely:
States that have passed civil unions have found that they’re fundamentally unequal and harmful. [See here, here, and here.] As the Supreme Court of Connecticut wrote in 2008 when it struck down a statute that prohibited same-sex marriage, civil unions and marriage “are by no means ‘equal.’”
How can anyone claim that domestic partners have all the rights of marriage when access to civil marriage licenses and to the word “marriage” is forbidden to same-sex couples, and when courts have ruled that the two statuses are not legally equal?
Apparently the bishops hope to distract heterosexual voters from recognizing the common human desire they share with same-sex couples to commit their lives to loving and caring for their spouse. If the bishops can get voters to believe that same-sex couples are only concerned with a bundle of legal rights which they already allegedly possess (even if that isn’t true), they can more easily promote the idea that gays are only craven benefits-grabbers and that therefore the social covenant of marriage is a special right that should be enjoyed by opposite-sex couples only.
18 Comments
As I recall making the argument during the Prop 8 run up, too many people like these bishops mix the religious concept of marriage with the state sanctioned and licensed institution of marriage. And so long as the various states and Federal government offer a thousand or more discrete benefits to “married” couples, blocking a category of citizens from these full rights is a classic definition of discrimination.
But you already know this.
Why should Roman Catholic bishops tell the truth? Why, that would be downright…Biblical.
But then again, they couldn’t spread their propaganda if they were honest.
For instance, in Quebec has a civil marriage and a church marriage. Yes, that is right, couples do a church marriage and then go down to city hall. Napoleonic code. Now that is *real* separation of church and state!
Oh…they can claim about anything the want…like, men in whales, talking snakes, and women that pop off a mans rib.
cupich is a good person and doesn’t belong in this group.
there is intense pressure to sign such statements when the archbishop of a particular region demands that the local bishops, like cupich, sign on.
he’s tried to resist such statements and he would if he could.
the catholic church is very fucked up and some good bishops are bullied relentlessly by a the right-wing ascendancy.
this isn’t an excuse for his action; it’s an explanation.
and i want to point out that the biggest reason the claim that we already have legal equality is washington state is a big lie is DOMA. with doma in place, we have none of the federal rights and responsibilities of marriage no matter where we live. maybe these guys ought to go to confession. lying=bad.
Can’t be a lie. That would be a sin, 8th commandment and all that. Catholic bishops lie? No way. Maybe they have been granted an exception, yep that must be it. Ten commandments apply to everyone except catholic bishops. Morality for thee but not for me.
Well well, looks like there is some pushback to church politicking from rank-and-file Catholic faithful. Or whoever these guys are. I got an email from them, probably b/c I bought a Nuns on the Bus tshirt. Well, yeah, they were asking me to donate (three separate places to click to donate… sigh) as well as sign a petition. Maybe they are just fund-raising. I have gotten so cynical.
i just read that cupich has made three videos arguing against ref. 74.
he’s caved.
i guess i’m wrong about him and am very dissapointed.
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With DOMA gone in the near future, there will be clear inequality at the federal level. Marriage will be recognized by the federal government, while DPs and CUs won’t.
The Catholic Church was once the major force in the civilized world. Perhaps the Vatican yearns for the days when it decided who lived, who died, who owned the New World. I remnember back in my Catholic youth, it was a mortal sin to eat meat on a Friday. I do not recall any movement to make non-Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays. In fact, we were taught that our Friday meat-eating friends were exempt from mortal sinning if they werre acting according to their beliefs. Boy howdy, has that ever changed. Do you think thakt is why they dispensed with Friday abstinence?
I am a seriously fallen-away Catholic, although I do support me some feisty nuns, I was amused that when I drove my visiting, born-again Catholic son to Mass on a Sunday he was horrified. “Real Catholics,” he informed me, “don’t go to Mass every Sunday.” Well, indeed. Somehow I don’t think that the Church heirarchy is cool with Catholics making it up as they go along — reminds me of some ‘Buddhists’ of the ’60′s.
Am I the only one that thinks the Catholic church has forever disqualified itself from any discussion against homosexuality or for that matter pedophilia?
I am NOT conflating the two, but I firmly believe that the catholic church turned a lot of what would have been normally adjusted gay men into pedophiles by unrelentingly suppressing normal outlets for their sexuality. Their families sent them to the seminaries out of embarrassment for the church to “straighten them out”; that didn’t go so well.
Now the church wants to export their success?
Mankind lost something like 600 years of social and scientific progress thanks to the catholic church, isn’t enough, enough?
Once upon a time, Catholic bishops made a careful distinction between
(1) the civil institution of “marriage,” which they claimed was the province of government, and
(2) the sacrament of “matrimony,” which they claimed was the province of “The Church.”
Per Jesus Christ, we should render unto Caesar (the government) the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. So perhaps the drafters “separation-of-church-and-state” clause of the first amendment were doing a better job of following Christ’s advice than are his current set of bishops.
The bishops lied about child sexual abuse by clergy what’s the big deal about this one?
Hmmm, I cannot speak from personal experience, but as someone who attended Catholic school from middle-school through high school, I can see how this might have happened, and with no malice intended. If, for example, a young man found that he was not attracted to ladies, never mind that he was to even the slightest degree attracted by gentlemen (perish the thought! Perish it, I say!!), what would he do? Assuming he was devout, and in general, teenagers are notoriously serious as to their feelings, he might, in order to keep his sanity, conclude that God was calling him to another path. OK.
Right out of high school, sometimes as early as high school, he might go to a nice seminary. Fine, 14 to 20 year old boys are (or were, I am *so* old) known as ‘chicken’. I say, not the kids fault, although predation begets predators. Who to blame? Nobody, maybe. Just stop it.
So that is how is starts. Trust me, I have seen it happen, over and over, although it took me decades to connect the dots. The cycle needs to be stopped.
I was thinking of when I was little (too long ago), when a kid would do something unspeakably embarrassing, the seminary was a viable solution as opposed to juvenile hall, which would have embarrassed the family. If you had connections to the church, you could get him in. You would hear about someone pulling strings and calling in favors to help the poor family, and the kid would disappear to the seminary. The offending act wasn’t never discussed out loud or directly.
As much as I am convinced that homosexuality is not learned, I am convinced that pedophilia can be learned and seems to come out of problem childhoods.
A family friend at all my extended family gatherings was high in the Catholic church. She worked on the non-existent floor of the Catholic hospital reserved for pregnant nuns. She was the one that first told us about the seminary and being a dumping ground for embarrassing problems.
Following the bishops’ logic, Rosa Parks should have had no problem with Jim Crow laws, because she had the legal right to ride the same Montgomery city buses, on the same schedules, to the same destinations, as everybody else.