Civil & religious difference

CHRISTINE Flowers and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts deliberately confuse three separate institutions: two secular civil functions and one religious.

The secular functions of marriage are a public accommodation: the granting of the marriage license, and the rights that the formal marriage gives to those who follow through to achieve marriage, either through civil marriage or religious marriage. As such, both Justices Anthony Kennedy and Roberts acknowledged during argument that the secular granting of marriage licenses, and the granting of a special legal partnership involving joint property and joint responsibility for the raising and care of children in the marriage, when restricted to heterosexual union, amounts to a civil-rights violation of sexual discrimination.

The religious institution of marriage is separate from the civil functions. If a couple chooses to follow up the granting of a marriage license with a formal religious ceremony, there is no demand that religious clerics violate their religious codes to marry same-sex couples. In point of fact, there are a number of religious faiths who already have agreed to marry same-sex couples, which some state laws forbid them to execute; in such cases, it is not the demands of LGBT citizens for other-gendered marriages that violate religious freedom, but rather the state's "religious" discrimination to restrict religiously sanctioned clerical action, which violates religious liberty.

Ben Burrows

Elkins Park