Marriage, no! Blackmail, yes!

The story ran above the fold on the front page of the Washington Post: “The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law.” Complete with quotes that seem as if they were focus-grouped for reasonableness (“The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular,” a church flack says. “For us, that’s really a problem.”), the ultimatum looked like a classic strategic leak–a scooplet slipped to reporters in the name of prodding government action.

It’s also an example of the idiocy that results when an organization dedicates its resources to the narrowest possible end. The political play for gay-marriage foes in this case is to rally downscale voters, presumably on the logic that this is an elitist cause which will now be seen to have actual harmful side-effects for the poor. A smart game, except for the fact that the vehicle by which the poor will be harmed is the church’s own ham-fisted retaliatory threat. This is blackmail, plain and simple. And my hunch is that it will be seen as such, and blow up in the Archdiocese’s face. (Indeed, the Post’s reaction story, tying the ultimatum to a hardening of the D.C. Council’s stance, suggests things aren’t going quite as the church planned).

For gay-marriage proponents, though, maybe the smarter response would be to take the diocese at its word. After all, the law wouldn’t force any church to perform same-sex marriages, or even to rent out its property for such affairs. But all organizations would have to obey city anti-discrimination laws. And that seems to be too much for the church, which fears it might be forbidden to deny people in same-sex, government-sanctioned, non-Catholic marriages the same benefits given to people in opposite-sex, government-recognized, non-Catholic marriages.

So the diocese, after all of that highfalutin talk about the sanctity of “faith teachings,” simply wants to be free to discriminate. So how about we let them. A carefully crafted bill might mollify this week’s concerns while also exposing the blackmailers for what they are: “Charitable groups shall henceforth be permitted to engage in job discrimination, personal mockery, or just tacky hostility based on race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, veteran’s status, political party, age, disability, or anything else they choose.” Since they’re throwing themselves into municipal politics, perhaps the diocese would care to embrace that law, too.