Feminist Looking Glass

Tomorrow (March 3) is another historic day for same-sex marriage. Unless something drastic happens, it will be the day that the Washington, D.C., law allowing same-sex marriage goes into effect. Many marriage applications are expected.

That means that the Catholic Church has lost its battle to prevent the law from going into effect. As Emily wrote in November, the church had gone on attack against the bill by threatening to cut off services that it offers in D.C., That would mean that services would be removed for thousands of homeless or low-income people, even though the bill would not require any religious organization to perform or assist with any same-sex marriages. The reason that the church made that threat was because, if the law went into effect, it would not be allowed to discriminate against the people employed by the group (Catholic Charities) that provides the services. Its stance was that it could not agree to provide employment benefits to employees who were involved in same-sex relationships because that would go against the beliefs of the church.  (Of course, it would seem unlikely that the church would employ any open lesbians or gays.)

Well, now that the threat didn’t work, the church has had to make a decision on what it should do.  One possibility, of course, would be to continue to provide services and offer employment benefits to any of its employees who are in same-sex relationships.   But, no, the church is not going to take that approach.

Instead, it has decided to continue to offer services (good!), but will not provide any spousal benefits to any new employees it hires (whether straight, lesbian or gay) or to current employees who are not already enrolled in its health plan.  That is truly unbelievable, but, of course, there are many truly unbelievable things that the church does (see this and this for examples).

Filed under: Religion, Same-sex Marriage, Workplace Tagged: | Catholic Church, Same-sex Marriage