During the build-up to last week’s vote, a headline in the Christian Science Monitor posed the question: Could Catholics play a decisive role? Now that the vote is over and the dust settled, the answer is clear: Catholics did indeed play that decisive role, but not in the way the conservatives in the Church had wanted.
A key factor in the success this year, compared with the disaster two years ago, was the shift in voter sentiment. As with the picture nationally, polls have shown a strong increase in support for marriage equality, and 4o% of NY voters are Catholic. Polls also show that in general, Catholic voters are more supportive of marriage (that is, marriage for all) than the general population. Politicians of all stripes pay attention to voter sentiment – so we can conclude that Catholic voters helped to push their politicians in the right direction.
At the other end of the political spectrum, was the man with the greatest personal political influence, Governor Cuomo, a Catholic. His extraordinary effort was critical in mobilising the broad coalition, and the massive funds it raised, that persuaded key individual senators to change their minds and vote yes.
In the middle, were the politicians who cast the votes, many Catholics among them. In the assembly, the bill was sponsored by a Catholic, Daniel O’Donnell, in the senate, the bill’s champion was openly gay Tom Duane, who was raised Catholic. The tipping point this year was the group of senators who changed sides this year, which included two Catholic Republicans, senators Alesi and Grisanti.
It is clear that Catholic influence permeated this victory for marriage, from top to bottom. Why?
Why Catholics Support Family Equality
First, let me stress that I see this vote not simply as a victory for gay marriage, but as a victory for marriage (unqualified), and for family values. Family is an important Catholic value, to which Catholic bishops often pay lip-service. As celibate single men, however, they have a limited understanding of what families and family values really are. To illustrate, I want to tell you a little about my own family.
My mother Doreen was a convert to Catholicism, but assiduous in her own commitment to the faith. During her second pregnancy, she suffered from severe bad health, to the extent that she was strongly advised by the doctors to abort (an extremely unusual in South Africa in the early 1950′s, indicating the degree of concern), but she absolutely refused. Major surgery left her with the equivalent of just a single lung, but refusing to use artificial contraception, she went on to bear seven children, suffer through a miscarriage, and later to foster, then adopt, another son. As each of her five daughters approached their wedding days, she earnestly implored each of them to refuse artificial contraception. They did not – but this did not result in any loss of love or criticism from her.
One of my sisters made a mistake which resulted in pregnancy while still at school. This created obvious problems and difficult decisions to be taken, but tensions or conflict within the family were not among them. She continued to be loved, and wrapped in that love, was helped to get through that difficult time, and emerge the stronger for it. Another of my sisters made an unwise and early marriage to an obsessively jealous and domineering young man. When the time came that she felt she had no choice but to leave him, she knew that she could return to the family home with her two young children, and find full love, comfort and support. Neither pregnancy before marriage, nor divorce, were in accord with my mother’s strict understanding of appropriate Catholic behaviour, but that did not prevent her exercising the most important Catholic value, and Gospel command, of all – total and unqualified love.
And so, when in my own journey the time came for me to recognize my sexual orientation and come out to myself, I had no hesitation at all in coming out also to my family. I did not need to – I had been married with two children, and was living in Johannesburg, eight hundred miles from the coast where the rest of the family were. Honesty though is also an important Catholic value. “The truth will set you free”, as Scripture (and notoriously, the CDF Homosexualitatis Problema) remind us, and I was determined not to lie to my family about myself. I was naturally nervous about how the news would be received and the immediate response, but I knew without any doubt, that there would not be any question of rejection or hostility – nor was there. A generation later, when a niece in turn came out to her mother, my sister was equally adamant that she would have the total and unqualified support and continued love of her family. Later, when she married her wife, the entire extended family crossed the country to attend the wedding on a Cape Town beach, just as they would have done for any other family member.
This, to me, is what real family values are about: mutual love, commitment and support, no matter what.
At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes an important point on how such family values have led to votes for marriage equality. First, he describes how family led to a change of heart for Carl Kruger, and then continues:
Coming out to your family is a specific trauma that doesn’t really translate directly to other groups who’ve the felt the boot on their neck. If there’s a parallel experience, it doesn’t occur to me. As indicated here, it’s often the source of great pain.
But it is also the source of great political power. People who seek to ostracize gays, must always countenance the potential for disappearing their very family members. It’s not like red-lining black people into ghettos. Homophobes must always face the prospect of condemning their own flesh and blood.
Surely there are those, who, with depressing regularity, rise to the occasion. But democracy in America is fundamentally optimistic in that holds that a critical mass of the electorate is persuadable. I’ve long been skeptical of this implicit assumption. But as I’ve aged, I have come to see it as quite brilliant. In the present case, I don’t know of a more powerful tool of democratic persuasion than the prospect of losing family.
Archbishop Dolan.
Meanwhile, at National Catholic Reporter, Jamie L Manson describes how families do not behave (but Catholic bishops do):
After expressing his disappointment with the bill’s passage, Dolan stated:
“To the gay community, I love you very much. If anything I ever said or did would lead you to believe that I have anything less than love or respect for you, I apologize.”
As the archbishop spoke these words, just outside the cathedral doors stood more than a dozen peaceful protestors from the New York chapter of DignityUSA. They have offered this witness every Gay Pride Sunday since 1987. They stand together for thirty minutes each year, waiting for a dialogue that the archbishop chose instead to have with news cameras.
Fifteen blocks south of St. Patrick’s, members of the gay and lesbian ministry at the Church of St. Francis Xavier lined up for the fifteenth consecutive year to march in the Gay Pride Parade. Since Dolan came to New York, he has attempted to block the parishioners from marching in the parade under their traditional banner, which read, “The Church of St. Francis Xavier, A Roman Catholic Parish.” For decades Xavier has been recognized city-wide and nationally for its prophetic outreach to LGBT Catholics.
Jamie L Manson, NCR Online
Families speak, and listen, to each other. As far as I can tell, there are scarcely any bishops anywhere, of the many thousands around the world, who can seriously be said to be talking or listening to the queer Catholics they so easily condemn, and against whom they are so eager to continue discrimination. “Family” is an important Catholic value - and so is equality. It makes sense that Catholics should want to combine both, in family equality.
Archbishop Dolan’s rant against gay marriage has already received wide coverage, and I have no desire to rehash this, except on one point. Part of his argument was that as a democratic country, US politicians should not be interfering in the regulation of marriage, and allow for freedom of religion. This is precisely the point: the marriage bill was not about imposing anything, but about removing a government restriction on marriage, the restriction on marriage, and permitting the exercise of freedom of religion, for those religious denominations that do no wish to discriminate on grounds of gender or orientation. If he is serious about government non-interference and religious freedom on marriage decisions, he should also have a word with his counterparts in the Philippines. There, the Catholic bishops have reacted to a mass wedding of same-sex couples celebrated by the Metropolitan Community Church, by demanding that the government interfere and prevent religious freedom in future.
The Other Catholic Bishops of New York State.
But to me, the really interesting thing about the Catholic bishops and NY gay marriage is not how vigorously they fought against it (as the headlines would have it), but how lukewarm this opposition was overall, and how calm they have been in response. Yes, Archbishop Dolan’s opposition has been widely reported, as has Bishop Nicholas DiMazio’s hostile response after the fact, but there’s more than this to consider. Just as Sherlock Holmes pointed to the interesting fact of the dog that barked in the night (because it didn’t), I too am interested in the interesting fact of the strenuous opposition – that was not there. Some of the more detailed analyses of the proceedings leading up to last week’s vote have noted how Archbishop Dolan appeared to enter the fight fairly late, and then withdrew before it was all over. After the event, he had little to say, and appears to have accepted marriage equality as inevitable.
Dolan and DiMazio are just two bishops in New York state. From the website of the New York State Catholic Conference, I count a total of 21 Catholic bishops, in 10 dioceses (including two of the Eastern rites).
- Archdiocese of New York (Archbishop Timothy Dolan, plus four active auxiliaries)
- Diocese of Brooklyn (Bishop Nicholas DiMazio, plus four active auxiliaries)
- Diocese of Rockville Centre (Bishop William Murphy, plus three auxilaries)
- Diocese of Albany (Bishop Howard J. Hubbard)
- Diocese of Syracuse (Bishop Robert J. Cunningham)
- Diocese of Rochester (Bishop Matthew H. Clark)
- Diocese of Buffalo (Bishop Edward U. Kmiec)
- Diocese of Ogdensburg (Bishop Terry R LaValley)
and two Eastern rite dioceses:
- Ukrainian Eparchy of Stamford (Bishop Paul Patrick Chomnycky)
- Eparchy of St. Maron of Brooklyn (Bishop Gregory J. Mansour)
Of all of these, I am not aware of any public activity by any of them against a measure that affects the entire state, not just New York City. Obviously, much of their activity will have been in private lobbying, but still I am left with a sense that to a degree, the bishops of New York did (collectively) no more than they could reasonably be expected to by the traditionalists. Some (but not all) have published personal statements of regret similar to that of Bishop DiMazio. Others have been content with just a discrete link on their diocesan websites to the collective statement by all New York bishops. Overall, the response has been muted and moderate. Like Focus on the Family, they appear to have recognised that the fight to preserve marriage in their own conception of what it should be has been lost.
The nature, purpose and forms of marriage have been constantly redefined over the centuries, often by the Christian church itself, as it began to interfere in what (in Europe) was originally a purely secular matter to govern property and inheritance. Now that New York State has agreed to remove unnecessary governmental restrictions on marriage, and improved religious freedom in allowing churches to decide which couples they are willing to marry, Catholics should celebrate, not condemn, this victory for marriage and family values.
Related articles
- New York Catholics Support Gay Marriage – Overwhelmingly!
- NY Latinos and the Gay Marriage Religious Divide
- Catholic hierarchs lose marriage battle to Catholic laity (National Catholic Reporter).
- Church lost on gay marriage because they’re wrong (Irish Central)
- John Allen Declares The Progressive vs Conservative Wars Are Over—Guess Who Lost?(Enlightened Catholicism)
- Mary Hunt’s Response to Archbishop Dolan’s “Truth Claims that Do Not Hold Water”(The Wild Reed)
- In New York, a “Breakthrough Victory” for Marriage Equality(The Wild Reed)
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