In the midst of Gay Pride month, the New York legislature has become
the most recent battleground in the fight for marriage equality, and,
not surprisingly, the Catholic Church is fighting tooth and nail to
resist progress.
A bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York
passed the legislature Friday, and with Gov. Andrew Cuomo's signature,
the law will make the Empire State the most populous so far to legalize
gay marriage.
But Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York and
president of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which has the
dubious distinction of having sponsored a "study" dismissing priest
pedophilia as an isolated cultural hiccup of the 1960s, grasped at the
final straws of intolerance and leaned hard on legislators to oppose
gay marriage.
Writing on his blog, Dolan hyperventilated that, "Last
time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in
the United States of America — not in China or North Korea," where
"communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who
lives and who dies and what the very definition of 'family' and
'marriage' means."
This slippery-slope argument is frequently
invoked by the gay-bashing movement — a suggestion that letting gays
marry would not just be an affront to Christian beliefs, but would
fundamentally destroy American freedom.
But over the past decade
or so the divorce rates in states like Connecticut, Massachusetts and
Vermont (all of which allow gay marriage) have consistently been
dramatically lower than those in the Bible Belt states. There doesn't
seem to be evidence of societal and moral decay as the result of
implementing marriage equality.