The Catholic Church in Minnesota is going all out to win the anti-gay marriage amendment vote. According to Archbishop John Nienstedt, the future of marriage depends on its passage. Never mind that the Catholic practice of annulment is the real mockery of marriage.
Declared a Canon Law in the eleventh century, annulment treats marriage as a life-long contract that can be declared null and void under four conditions. Those conditions amount to a back door way out of marriage in order to protect the Church’s prohibition against divorce. The best that can be said about this practice is that it is disingenuous, but in truth it was exposed for the political fraud it actually is in 1997 when Sheila Rauch Kennedy took the Massachusetts Diocese to court for declaring her marriage “annulled” at the request of her then husband, former Congressman Joseph Kennedy (son of the late Robert Kennedy). She said she would not allow the church to render her children “illegitimate,” which would have been the de facto effect of the annulment. She won her case, and, thereby, showed the world the mockery of marriage annulment represents.
For the Catholic Church in Minnesota to be the largest financial contributor to a campaign supposedly to protect the sacredness of marriage is yet another example of how the church continues to ignore the impact hypocrisy has on its credibility. But the Catholic Church is not alone in this denial. Protestant congregations are also guilty of all manner of hypocrisy, including support for this amendment, all the while pretending their hypocrisy will go unnoticed by an increasingly skeptical public weary of religious moralism. It’s actually astonishing how foolish churches are.
One of the most disturbing things about church support for the anti-gay marriage amendment here and in other states is the fact that they have become party to intentional deception by the marketing firms employed to win the day. An ad running in Minnesota says that marriage equality in other states has forced churches, schools, and businesses to defend themselves against discrimination. This is an outright lie, but it is nothing compared to the fact that it is being paid for by churches. You would think people who claim to be doing God’s work would have the courage, commitment, and presence of mind to say that anything and everything put before the public in support of the amendment be true, that no ad could be intentionally false or misleading. Yet they obviously haven’t done so, their conscience soothed by the belief that the end justifies the means.
As in other states, it is quite possible that the Archbishop and his allies will win the vote once again. But if they succeed, they will not only have encased discrimination in the state Constitution, they will have succeeded in bringing shame on themselves, and, in the public’s view, on all the rest of us who claim to be Christian.
