Washington, D.C. just got a lot more awesome.(photo by Tyler Sit)
The Washington, D.C. city council voted to approve same-sex marriage today, in the process creating one of the best gifts that I've received for Hanukkah's in a long time.
Well that's good news. What's maybe not-so-good news is Archbishop Donald Wuerl threatens to cut the Catholic Church's social programs, cutting off service to 68,000 of the capital's poor, including the homeless and immigrants.
Ah, yes. Clearly it makes sense: remove one of the best things that the Catholic Church does--help those on the fringes of society--to bolster a crusade against another minority. Well done.
The Archbishop threatened this before marriage was voted on, though, and yet the city council still supported marriage equality. His fear tactic didn't work. If the church's social programs are cut, though, people will suffer. It's a lose-lose-lose situation: Wuerl doesn't get what he wants, the homeless are thrown into the depths of poverty, and the church is further illegitimated in the eyes of the public.
It's kind of like realizing you're going to lose a chess game so you pick up the board and throw it against the wall. Wuerl realizes that the times are changing, so he's throwing off the gloves and leveraging whatever he can to strong arm people away from equality.
The only glitch with the chess metaphor, I suppose, is that when someone loses at chess he doesn't freeze to death on the streets of Washington, D.C. because an Archbishop can't tell the difference between a deluded moral tirade and trashing the very heart of Jesus' gospel.
Even if the government were corrupt and doing the most awful things in the world, why would that ever stop a person of faith from helping the poor?
I'll be praying for you this holiday season, Archbishop Wuerl.
Peace,
TS
This is the same thing that the Church did in MA. The Church decided to pull out all Catholic adoption agencies from MA once state law would have required them to treat gay couples equally because adoption is not covered by the protection of religious freedom. Now, the Church talks about begin "forced" out of MA because their rights were being infringed upon, when in reality Church leaders just disagreed with the law and preferred to cut a service like that. the Church just doesn't want to hear that there are limits to the discrimination it can practice, and then plays the victim in their rhetoric from then on. I think the Chess board analogy works perfectly, Tyler.
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