Recently on my weekend radio program on WIBC-FM in Indianapolis, we discussed the proposed marriage amendment Indiana lawmakers will likely take up when they return in January.
I had a caller who said while he did not have a problem personally with same-gender marriage, he was worried his church would be sued, presumably by the American Civil Liberties Union and forced to perform such ceremonies.
I asked him who told him that and he said his pastor. I politely told him his pastor was misinformed.
That call did not surprise me in the sense that one of the standard lines supporters of the marriage amendment have been spouting is that it would force churches or any other religious organizations to recognize and perform same-gender ceremonies.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
And everyone who is being intellectually honest knows this – unless they have willfully chosen to violate that commandment about bearing false witness, which would then make me want to violate the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain.
The law has always granted special exemptions to churches and religious organizations. The issue arises when the church or religious group open their facilities to the public; that’s where things get a little complicated.
For example, if a church rented an apartment building only to members of its congregation or faith, then it is not opening its doors to the public and it can exclude anyone who doesn’t fit that criteria. However, if the building was open to everyone, then the church has to take everyone or lose its tax-exempt status. A bunch of private Southern colleges found this out the hard way back in the 1960s when they tried to exclude people with my skin complexion from enrolling in their fine institutions of higher learning.
For the most part, churches enjoy what’s called the “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination laws. This is why women can’t sue the Catholic church in order to become priests, Christian schools can fire an unmarried, pregnant teacher, and my wife’s pastor could refuse to perform our wedding four years ago because one of us wasn’t a Christian.
The literature on this subject is pretty extensive if people will just take the time to look it up. Or they know better but have decided to engage in deception in order to promulgate fear and scare lawmakers into putting the marriage amendment on the ballot and then frighten the public into voting for it.
I’m not a Christian, but that doesn’t seem like Christian behavior to me. If anything, it seems more like something a person would do if he were an agent of that other place with the fire and brimstone.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is an attorney, political commentator and publisher of IndyPolitics.org. You can email comments to him at abdul@indypolitics.org.
