The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life posted a Q & A-type article yesterday, “[1] A Clash of Rights? Gay Marriage and the Free Exercise of Religion.” 

“With New Hampshire poised to become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage, could religious individuals and institutions that oppose gay marriage be required to recognize or even solemnize these unions? Although churches and other religious organizations, including charities and schools, have typically been exempt from state and local laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, it remains unclear how these religious institutions might be affected by new laws that require equal treatment for same-sex marriages.”

[2] [2] [2]

[5]

I don’t think they’re talking to each other.

They also have a separate Issue Page on [6] Gay Marriage. 

The Forum tries to analyze and discuss the issues fairly and accurately.  A disinterested party who works through their material might conclude that religious organizations want “wiggle room” to permit them to be prejudicial and rejective without interference by law or public policy.  In other words, to remain internally homophobic and to be left alone.

Frankly, I am more than willing to leave anti-gay religious groups alone.  My spouse and I are not inclined to walk into the local Mormon stake or Catholic mass, and make a scene demanding recognition of our legal marriage (just to name those two large organization that strongly backed Proposition 8 in California).

But such analysis is worthless, in one sense, because the conservative position (”opponents of gay marriage”) have an underlying motive beyond being left alone to discrimnate against LGBT people internally.  Beyond the prejudicial and rejective motives is the punitive motive. 

Although the most outrageous (perhaps!) is Rev. Fred Phelps of Topeka Kansas, he is not alone in his constant vitriol of hatred and threatened punishment.  There are hundreds of web sites which say similar stuff, and thousands of blogs which publish the opinions of those who talk openly of physical harm and death for LGBT people.  This is routine, folks.  Gay marriage is only the immediate flash point for this kind of hatred.

So when it comes to law and public policy, the truthful issue for us is this:  are hatred, homophobia, death threats, and punitive political organizing  things which deserve to be exempt under the law, or protected as freedom of speech or freedom of religion?  Or are these homophobic entities simply hiding behind the facade of religion?

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.  He said to them, “It is written,  ’My house shall be called a house of prayer’;  but you are making it a den of robbers.”  — Matthew 21:12-13

Jesus, of course, did not go to Pilate or the Roman courts and file a lawsuit. He sought no political solution against those who use their religion as a “den”–a hiding place where thieves go after committing their crimes.   (The implication of this scriptural passage is that the robbery, thievery and dishonesty, etc. is in the public venue, and religion is simply the retreat house for those who are dishonest in public.)

But in his zealous driving out of the thieves, he tells us that religion itself, God’s temple, should be no refuge for such scoundrels.  With or without a marriage license, I am not inclined to enter a Mormon or Catholic church and attempt to drive out anybody, either.  Change will come only when people who belong there already have the zeal and courage to cleanse their own houses of worship, and to convince their co-religionists that working to steal our civil rights in public and then retreating to God’s house is immoral.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles