WASHINGTON (ABP) — A federal judge’s Aug. 4 ruling declaring unconstitutional a California ban on same-sex marriage is either disastrous or a monumental step forward, depending on which Baptist leader you ask. But, according to church-state experts, it doesn’t directly affect religious liberty.
“This is a grievously serious crisis in how the American people will choose to be governed,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, in a statement reacting to U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling. “The people of our most populous state — a state broadly indicative of the nation at large demographically — voted to define marriage as being between one man and one woman, thus excluding same-sex and polygamous relationships from being defined as marriage.
“Now, an unelected federal judge has chosen to override the will of the people of California and to redefine an institution the federal government did not create and that predates the founding of America. Indeed, ‘marriage’ goes back to the Garden of Eden, where God defined His institution of marriage as being between one man and one woman.”
But Interfaith Alliance President Welton Gaddy — who is also pastor of Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, La. — called the ruling “a promising step for religious freedom and for marriage equality, recognizing the important distinctions between civil marriage and religious marriage.”
Gaddy said he was pleased that Walker, in his ruling, “was sensitive to the concerns of people of faith who oppose same-gender marriage on religious grounds but that he recognized, as do we, that their religious freedom will not be impacted by the legalization of same-gender marriage…. Under this ruling, as with any constitutionally based marriage equality law, no religion would ever be required to condone same-gender marriage, and no member of the clergy would ever be required to perform a wedding ceremony not in accordance with his or her religious beliefs.”
In his Perry v. Schwarzenegger decision, the judge noted that proponents of the ban — passed by 52 percent of California voters in 2008 and known as Proposition 8 — had failed to muster any evidence during the trial supporting their view that the state had a legitimate secular interest in denying marriage rights to gays.
“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license,” Walker wrote. “Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.”
Walker said that the pro-Proposition 8 argument basically boiled down to anti-gay bigotry.
“In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.”
Bob Tuttle
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Bob Tuttle, a church-state expert and professor at the George Washington University Law School, said the ruling only directly implicates religious liberty if one defines “religious liberty” as the right to make laws based exclusively on religious opinions or reasoning.
“The court says (correctly as a matter of current law) that a law must have a valid secular purpose; purposes that are solely religious do not meet that requirement, so a law based on exclusively religious premises is invalid,” he said Aug. 5. “Religious groups are, of course, free to believe as they see fit, and in general to act on those beliefs, but they have no legal right or power to legislate those beliefs into civil law. In that respect, the ban on laws with exclusively religious premises does limit the ‘liberty’ of religious individuals to enact religious laws, but that's the only sense in which their liberty is restricted by this ruling — or the broader constitutional principle.”
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.