Commentary: No false witness in marriage debate, please

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz
IndyPoltics.Org

Abdul Hakim-Shabazz is an attorney and the editor and publisher of IndyPoltics.Org.

Recently on my weekend radio program on WIBC-FM in Indianapolis, we were discussing the proposed marriage amendment Indiana lawmakers will likely take up when they return in January.

I had a caller on the air who said while he did not have a problem personally with same-gender marriage, he was worried that his church would be sued, presumably by the American Civil Liberties Union and be forced to perform such ceremonies.

I asked him who told him that and he said his pastor. I politely told him has pastor was misinformed and while anyone can sue anyone in America, I could not – after 10 years of being an attorney – imagine a situation in which a court would force a bona fide church to perform a same-gender wedding.

That call did not surprise me in the sense that one of the standard lines supporters of the marriage amendment have been spouting is that it would force churches or any other religious organizations to recognize and perform same-gender ceremonies.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

And everyone who is being intellectually honest knows this – unless they have willfully chosen to violate that commandment about bearing false witness, which would then make me want to violate the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain.

The law has always granted special exemptions to churches and religious organizations. The issue arises when the church or religious group opens their facilities to the public; that’s where things get a little complicated.

For example, if a church rented an apartment building only to members of its congregation or faith, then it is not opening its doors to the public and it can exclude anyone who doesn’t fit that criteria. However, if the building was open to everyone, then the church has to take everyone or lose its tax-exempt status. A bunch of private southern colleges found this out the hard way back in the 1960s when they tried to exclude people with my skin complexion from enrolling in their fine institutions of higher learning.

For the most part, churches enjoy what’s called the “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination laws. This is why women can’t sue the Catholic church in order to become priests, Christian schools can fire an unmarried, pregnant teacher, and my wife’s pastor could refuse to perform our wedding four years ago because one of us wasn’t a Christian and had no plans on converting anytime soon.

The literature on this subject is pretty extensive if people will just take the time to look it up. If they don’t, it is because they either don’t know, which I can forgive and which is why I decided to write this column in the first place. They are willfully ignorant and don’t know want to know.

Or in the worst-case scenario – which I suspect is true in most cases – they know better but have decided to engage in deception in order to promulgate fear and scare lawmakers into putting the marriage amendment on the ballot and then frighten the public into voting for it.

I’m not a Christian, but that doesn’t seem like Christian behavior to me. If anything, it seems more like something a person would do if he were an agent of that other place with the fire and brimstone.

Abdul is an attorney and the editor and publisher of IndyPoltics.Org. He is also a frequent contributor to numerous Indiana media outlets. He can be reached at abdul@indypolitics.org.