Learning to Live with Same-Sex Marriage?
by Gerard V Bradley, Public Discourse:
The city of Philadelphia is targeting Catholic Social Services for its policy, based on religious beliefs about marriage, of not placing foster children with same-sex couples.
“Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.” So said the Supreme Court, speaking through Justice Anthony Kennedy, nearly three years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges. In that case, a bare five-member majority mandated that civil marriage be available to same-sex couples “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.”
The Court explained its holding by saying that “when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.”
In the final examination I gave to my constitutional law students, I asked them whether these two passages, located within the same paragraph near the end of the Obergefell opinion, make “coherent sense. Why or why not?”
My students struggled with that one.
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