Gay Marriage Foes Shift Tactics, Arguing Legalized Gay Unions Threaten Religious Liberty

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Religious conservatives are shifting their line of attack against gay marriage. It's no longer just that legalized gay unions will undermine the basic building block of Western civilization.

As more states legalize gay marriage, opponents are arguing that the trend will impinge on religious liberties by forcing religious conservatives to overcome faith-based objections and provide services to legally wed gay couples.

I write about this tactical shift in my latest God & Country column for U.S. News Weekly. Here's the top:

An anti-gay-marriage group made big news this month by producing a television ad starring Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA runner-up whose opposition to same-sex marriage might have cost her the crown. Featuring footage of Prejean's response to a gay-marriage question at the recent Miss USA pageant, the spot triggered charges that she violated her Miss California contract—which restricts work with advocacy groups—and turned Prejean into a national spokeswoman for religious conservatives.

But Prejean's ad was noteworthy for another reason. Whereas religious conservatives have argued for years that legalized gay unions would undermine the basic family unit, her commercial took a much different tack. Legalized same-sex marriages, the commercial warns, threaten gay-marriage opponents' religious liberties. "Gay-marriage activists . . . want to silence opposition," says a voice in the ad as the words Protect Religious Lib erty flash across the screen. "The gay-marriage movement says that if you oppose same-sex marriage, you're a bigot," says Maggie Gallagher, president of the National Organization for Marriage, the group behind the ad. "So there's going to be a lot of legal pressure on religious people and organizations that as a matter of conscience can't treat same-sex marriage like traditional marriage."

In the five states that have legalized gay marriage, religious conservatives say those pressures have already arrived. After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, for example, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston stopped providing adoption services, saying that placing children with same-sex parents would violate church teaching. Gay rights advocates argue that such faith-based objections should not exempt organizations from treating legally married gays and lesbians the same as other couples. Which means that as more states legalize gay marriage—legislatures in New York and Connecticut are now considering the move, and Congress is reviewing the District of Columbia's recent council vote to recognize gay marriages performed in other jurisdictions—more thorny legal battles are likely to break out between gay couples and conservative believers.

"Many religious conservatives would like to put gays back in the closet, and many gays and lesbians would like to put conservative churches in the closet," says University of Michigan Law School Prof. Douglas Laycock, who coedited the recent anthology Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts. "There's not a lot of willingness on either side to let the other just live its life."

Here's the rest.

• Read more by Dan Gilgoff.
• Read more about gay rights.