Archbishop of New York Apoplectic Over Legalization of Gay Marriage

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.

And in light of the Anthony Weiner scandal, the Arnold Schwarzenegger love-child saga and the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, it makes one wonder — who poses the bigger threat to the sanctity of marriage: Gay people or straight people?

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