New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, in his radio address Friday morning admitted the Catholic Church has been highly-involved in lobbying Albany lawmakers against passing Governor Cuomo’s marriage equality bill. Saying “we’ve been doing everything we can,” Dolan offensively calls the same-sex marriage bill “unjust and immoral,” and “perilous.”
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Archbishop Timothy Dolan is strongly associated with The New York State Catholic Conference, which bills itself as “the official public policy voice of the Catholic Church in New York State.†This meshing of the church in the state’s business is a clear, direct conflict of the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state.
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“This is just perilous, Fred, we feel, to have the state tamper in one of the sacred and established and constituent definitions in the human project, namely the definition of marriage,” Archbishop Dolan said, according to a transcript and the recording below by Igor Volsky at Think Progress:
We just feel it would be detrimental for the common good. We’ve got to admit we come at this from the posture of religious belief, of biblical morality and we find it unjust and immoral from those grounds. But this goes a little bit beyond this. This is a very violation of what we consider natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman and we’re really worried as Americans that it’s going to be detrimental to the common good.
Even if there are so-called carve outs for religious freedom we still worry about the detrimental effect upon society, upon culture, and certainly upon our individual churches….And we worry, what the government gives, the government can take away so you may have very benevolent people now who say in no way are we going to force any religion to do something against their constituents and their beliefs and we will see that there are carve outs, but what about a term or two down the line, where you have someone who says, oh by the way, we’re going to take that carve out away from you.