Compromise with nothing

There is a very strange op-ed piece in today's New York Times. Called A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage and written by David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch, it offers a "sensitive compromise" that "can avert a major conflict down the road":

Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.

I find this enormously puzzling. Not because I disagree, but because, to the best of my knowledge, no one is out there demanding that "religious organizations ... recognize same-sex unions against their will".

I mean, who the hell ever put a gun to the head of the Catholic Church and demanded that they recognize the marriages of divorced people? Or extreme fundamentalists and inter-racial or inter-denominational marriages? Civil marriages are frequently between those who some church or another won't marry.

This dog won't hunt.

Granted, this oddly worded bill might satisfy Mormons (and others) who spent so freaking much money to defeat gay marriage in California. But no one was requiring them to let gays into the Temple. They're free to discriminate in their religion as much as they like. And they still went insane over the notion that gays could have civil rights.

This bill won't help, because this bill would force "religious organizations" to face facts. Let just one denomination (Episcopalians, I'm looking at you - and cheering a little, as long as you don't cave to the Africans) start having gay weddings with priests and all - real gay weddings, not just "blessings of unions"- and the rest of the religious will have to admit their bigotry; and the way they're whining about people making their donations public on Prop 8, it's pretty clear many of them want to be bigots in secret.

I have said for a long time that "marriage" should be reserved to the churches and have no civil rights attached to it. So I'm not in principle opposed to letting churches control who they call married and who they don't. I'm just opposed to letting them decide who we, the state, does.