Using Government to Enforce Religious Orthodoxy

This November Minnesota has an amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage, although there's already a law on the books that prevents it. This has brought out many of the usual suspects, such as the Catholic Church, which supports the ban, and the ACLU, which opposes it.

But there have been a few surprises, such as General Mills coming out against the ban, and two influential pastors who have decided not to take a public stand on the amendment.


This last development seems surprising, but is quite logical once you think about it. Both men have spoken out against gay marriage in the past, so it's clear what they think. But the Rev. John Piper said in a sermon:

Don't press the organization of the church or her pastors into political activism, Expect from your shepherds not that they would rally you behind political candidates or legislative mandates, but they would point you over and over again to God and to his word.

I applaud these men, because they realize that it's not in religion's best interests to enlist the government to enforce religious beliefs on others.


The Catholic Church, on the other hand, does not get it. If the Catholic hierarchy believes government has the ability to dictate something as basic as who you can and can't marry, then government certainly has the authority over picayune details such as requiring Catholic universities to provide their employees with health insurance policies that include birth control.


In other words, the Church can't complain that the government is trampling their religious freedoms while simultaneously calling for the government to trample other people's religious freedoms.


Hasn't the Catholic Church  learned its lesson after centuries of bloodshed in its name? The Church has burned homosexuals at the stake, executed people for heresies as trivial as the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation and the heliocentric theory of the solar system, and gone to war for that most heinous of heresies, the Protestant heresy, which according to current Catholic doctrine "denies the infallible authority of the Church and claims that each individual is to interpret Scripture for himself."

Amending a state constitution to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on everyone is less bloody than the Inquisition or the massacre of thousands of Calvinist Protestants on St. Bartholomew's Day by King Charles IX of France. But it's no different than Muslim countries incorporating Sharia law into their legal code, something which Catholics and Protestants alike can agree is a bad thing.