Top clerics join to support amendment
By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff, 2/8/2004
Escalating the campaign against the legalization of same-sex marriage, many of the most prominent religious figures in Massachusetts issued statements this weekend calling on the Legislature to preserve marriage as a heterosexual institution.
Three groups representing African-American clergy -- the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, the Boston Ten Point Coalition, and the Cambridge Black Pastors Conference -- jointly called for the Legislature to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Separately a multifaith coalition, featuring not only Catholic leaders but also leading evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims, declared their opposition to gay marriage. Signatories to the statement included the Rev. William P. Leahy, president of Boston College; the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III of the Azusa Christian Community; the Rev. David M. Midwood, the president of Vision New England, an umbrella organization of 2,000 evangelical Protestant churches; and Metropolitan Methodios, the Greek Orthodox hierarch of New England.
"It's important for people to understand the diversity and the multitude of groups that are concerned about this," said the Rev. Ray A. Hammond, pastor of Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, who signed the statement.
According to leaders who helped pull together the two statements, the documents are intended to make it clear that there is substantial local opposition to gay marriage, even from groups that are not comfortable with some of the more conservative out-of-state organizations, such as Focus on the Family, that have joined the battle on Beacon Hill. "I didn't want us to be viewed as a right-wing group," said the Rev. Wesley A. Roberts, the president of the Black Ministerial Alliance and pastor of Peoples Baptist Church. "I don't see this as a civil rights issue, because to equate what is happening now to the civil rights struggle which blacks had to go through would be to belittle what we had gone through as a people."
The black clergy statement reads, in part: "We acknowledge the pain and suffering of the men and women in the gay and lesbian community who are in long-term relationships. However, given the most recent opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court eliminating the possibility of civil Unions, we support the call for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman."
Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, helped pull together the multi-faith coalition. The Islamic Council of New England, which represents mosques throughout the region, signed on, as did two prominent Orthodox Jews, Grand Rabbi Y. A. Korff, who is the publisher of the Jewish Advocate, and Rabbi Gershon C. Gewirtz, who leads one of the area's largest Orthodox synagogues, Young Israel of Brookline.
"Each of the traditions we represent has long upheld the institution of marriage as a unique bond between a man and a woman," the multifaith statement said.
O'Malley yesterday fielded questions from a crowd of 1,300 Catholic teenagers who gathered at Merrimack College in North Andover, and a young woman from Dorchester asked the archbishop how to show compassion to people concerned about gay marriage and abortion. O'Malley responded that "God's law, that is written on our hearts, is what will truly make us free and noble and good as a people."
O'Malley will headline a rally at the State House today in opposition to gay marriage; in response, the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry, which includes many mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish clergy, will demonstrate on the other side of Boston Common.
"Every denomination or faith community should decide on its own who they will marry or who they won't marry, but because civil rights of individuals are involved, civil marriage should be open to everyone," said Episcopal Bishop M. Thomas Shaw.
Michael Paulson can be reached at [email protected]. Globe correspondent Peter DeMarco contributed to this report. The full texts of both statements are at www.boston.com.
Posted by P6 at February 8, 2004 11:43 AM
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Comments
I agree with M. Thomas Shaw on this issue. No religious group should be able to force its views on others. If they don't like these marriages, they can refuse to perform them or take part in them. They may not like it, but that's the way it has to be under secular law.
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at February 8, 2004 02:58 PMUnder a secular system, there should be no place for the government to decide who gets married at all.
That is the best solution. Communists and communitarians, though, see a role for the state in everything, even in religious affairs- with just the overt trappings of religion stripped away.
Posted by Brian at February 9, 2004 03:35 AMActually, I agree with you that the state should get out of marriages. However, your assertion that it's "communists" and "communitarians" who want the state to be involved in marriage is ludicrous in light of the fact that it's CONSERVATIVES who are trying to amend the Constitution to define marriage. Are you totally out of touch with reality?
Posted by Al-Muhajabah at February 9, 2004 05:53 AMI'm starting to think so.
Posted by P6 at February 9, 2004 06:59 AMThe Massachusetts Family Institute, part of The Alliance for Marriage, is trying to deny equal rights to gay people in Massachusetts.
They claim that they are trying to protect and preserve the sanctity of marriage and the family.
They are lying.
One of the members of The MFI / AFM is The Grand Rabbi Ira Korff, Chaplain for the City of Boston.
The title of �Grand Rabbi� is neither elected nor appointed-- it is inherited. The Jewish community didn�t choose Ira Korff.
He is lying.
For almost two years, I worked for Ira Korff at The Jewish Advocate newspaper in Boston.
Last year, within the space of about four months, my mother had congestive heart failure, my grandmother died, and I was diagnosed with cancer.
I spoke to Ira Korff and told him I was having another operation in a week, and my mother was having an operation the week after that.
I asked Ira Korff if I could take an unpaid medical leave for a month to protect and preserve my family and my health.
Grand Rabbi Ira Korff, Chaplain of the City of Boston, champion for the preservation and protection of the family, said �No.�
He told me that in this economy he could replace me quickly for less money.
In their crusade against gay people, Ira Korff and The Massachusetts Family Institute have joined forces with the leadership of The Islamic Society of North America-- supporters of Hamas and of Al Queda. Terrorists.
The image of same-sex couples at the altar together is more horrific to Ira Korff than people flinging themselves from the windows of the burning World Trade Center.
Ira Korff is more afraid of seeing gay people happily married than he is of seeing his own brethren lying mangled and bloody in the streets of Israel.
Ira Korff is also the Honorary Consulate to Austria. The post had been discarded in disgust following the election of a Nazi-sympathizer as Chancellor of Austria. Ira Korff jumped at the chance to take the unwanted �honorary� position on the bones of our martyred fathers.
He rubs shoulders with terrorists and Nazis.
These so-called protectors of the family and preservers of marriage are liars and frauds and hypocrites.
They are people like Ira Korff, whose newspaper I know (and can prove) has been lying for years about the circulation figures upon which it bases its advertising rates.
They are a motley assemblage of Judases, Uncle Toms and Judenrats.
Liars. Frauds. Hypocrites.
What Ira Korff and his fellow travelers are doing now has all been done before, and it started with laws about who was allowed to marry whom.
Why would someone want to exchange their yellow star for a swastika?We need everyone to speak up and say, with one voice, �Never Again!�
Sincerely,
Rev. Ian Brumberger
Brockton, MA