IGF CultureWatch

The vestry at All Saints Episcopal church in Pasadena has just announced that its clergy will no longer sign California marriage certificates for any couples that it marries in a religious ceremony. They are doing this as a response to the discrimination Prop. 8 added to California's constitution. According to the vestry resolution, they wish to avoid "active participation in the discriminatory system of civil marriage," which they believe 'is inconsistent with Jesus' call to strive for justice and peace among all people."

For over twenty years now, All Saints has been a national leader in the struggle for inclusion of lesbians and gay men, and particularly same-sex couples in church life. A church like All Saints has both a sacramental obligation and a moral imperative to treat homosexuals and heterosexuals equally, even if the law does not.

And this action illustrates how churches benefit by keeping church and state separate. As Timothy Hulsey once told me with the common sense that is so obvious it is often missed, same-sex marriage is, in fact, available today in all fifty states. No state does, or could, prohibit any church from marrying any two people in a religious ceremony that falls within its belief system. Whether a particular state views that marriage as legal is a matter for the state to determine. If the marriage violates criminal law related to, for example, the age of consent, the state can prosecute the crime; but criminal sanctions no longer apply to voluntary adult homosexual relationships. If a church in Virginia wishes to marry a same-sex couple, Virginia can constitutionally do nothing to stop it. Virginia can pass all the laws it wants to ignore or discourage that relationship in the civil society, but in the church's eyes that couple is as holy as any opposite-sex couple it chooses to bless.

Heterosexual couples married at All Saints will have to suffer the inconvenience of getting a secular signature on their California marriage certificate. But in return, they will have the assurance that, in the eyes of God, their marriage is on the same moral foundation as their homosexual brothers and sisters.