Catholic pastor applauded for shunning anti-gay marriage drive

Catholic pastor applauded for shunning anti-gay marriage drive

“The congregation at Seattle’s Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church gave the Rev. Tim Clark a standing ovation Sunday when he announced that the parish would not gather signatures for a referendum to repeal same-sex marriage.”

Good for Rev. Clark. But it does highlight the issue of people trying to implement laws because they feel that they have a better grasp on the “right” interpretation of their god’s words. The fact is they have no proof that this is the case.

Mr. Clark has no proof (other than his personal feelings on the matter) that his interpretation of his church’s holy book is more correct than Archbishop Sartain’s or Archbishop Niensted’s. He has no proof that his statement that he “deeply believe[s]… that this approach is not in the mind of Christ” is more aligned to his god’s than the Archbishops’ approach. And the Archbishops in turn obviously believe, with no proof of their own, that their interpretation is correct.

This is why we separate Church and State, and why we make sure that our laws don’t have a primary purpose of support for or discrimination against one religion’s interpretation of their own religious texts. And this is why the primary purpose for any laws MUST be secular: when religious texts can be used to support both sides of an issue, their use in deriving laws that affect people who don’t even share belief in that text is nil at best, and actively harmful at worst.