Just posted on the homepage, Michael J. Perry examines the reasoning of the Supreme Court's majority opinion holding the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional:
In my judgment, the Court made the right decision in Windsor, but the majority was much less clear than it should have been about why DOMA’s exclusion of same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. Kennedy’s opinion for the majority should not have put any weight on the alleged “animus” of those opposed to same-sex marriage. “Hate your neighbor or come along with us,” was how Justice Antonin Scalia characterized Kennedy’s reasoning. Scalia’s indignation was understandable. Kennedy’s suggestion that DOMA was based on the view that gays and lesbians are inferior human beings is tendentious in the extreme, and demeaning to all those who for a host of non-bigoted reasons uphold the traditional understanding of marriage as an essentially heterosexual institution. ...
I accept the bishops’ argument regarding the nonreligious nature of their opposition to same-sex marriage. The burden for the bishops, however, is the high bar set by the Constitution’s protection of religious and moral freedom—often called freedom of conscience. ...
Admittedly, it is not always obvious when a particular nonreligious moral belief is a minority moral belief. In answering that question, it is helpful to keep in mind what the celebrated American Jesuit John Courtney Murray wrote to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing in the mid-1960s about laws decriminalizing access to contraception. “T]he practice [contraception], undertaken in the interests of ‘responsible parenthood,’ has received official sanction by many religious groups within the community,” Murray noted. “It is difficult to see how the state can forbid, as contrary to public morality, a practice that numerous religious leaders approve as morally right. The stand taken by these religious groups may be lamentable from the Catholic moral point of view. But it is decisive from the point of view of law and jurisprudence.”
Read the whole thing here.
