BigGovernment has this:
The stage is being set so that military Chaplains can and most likely will be ordered to perform same sex marriage in contradiction to their religious beliefs.
WASHINGTON, May 22, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Democrat House leaders including Nancy Pelosi have opposed a measure to ensure military chaplains are not forced to perform same-sex “marriages,” arguing that it is based on a “manufactured crisis” and therefore unnecessary – a response strongly criticized by chaplain advocates.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday echoed sentiments issued by the Obama White House regarding the conscience language, part of a defense spending bill, saying that “there’s nothing that says that chaplains act against their faith.”
The result will be that chaplains of certain faiths abandon the military as they are forced to choose between violating their faiths or being driven out for not performing such marriage ceremonies.
What is required is the respect of certain long-established and broadly supported religious beliefs. We currently lack a White House and Democrat leadership capable of providing this respect. When Leftists empowered by big government meet religion, religion loses and is ultimately diminished in size and influence.
In a recent response to a friend post on FaceBook, I mentioned the types of areas that same-sex marriage hurts religious belief and places where faith and care and concern for the poor as well as children:
…Unfortunately, like many others, this is what Thomas Sowell calls “stage one” thinking. Emotions based policy making without asking what affect a decision will have on society. The oldest (and most successful) adoption agency in Massachusetts (80-years in the field of placing children with families, Illinois and California are sure to follow) and DC had to shut their doors because of their religious option to prefer heterosexual couples when adopting to homosexual couples, from Universities ceasing to give insurance to their students and staff, to forcing chaplains in the military to marry gay couples. These are the early consequences to stage one thinking…
You can add military chaplains to the mix. Decisions like these do not just affect “marriage,” they reverberate throughout all society. Special rights always sets up battles and shows how they destroy healthy thinking, for instance this dichotomy:
“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?” ~ Dale A. Berryhill, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy
The question become this, then. Would conservatively religious people serving LESS in the military hurt or help our nation? Does forcing one to reject his religious conscience by Government edict good or bad for society? This is stage two thinking. About 0.1 percent of all American military personnel officially declare themselves to be atheists, while about 77% are Christians — with about 3,000 chaplains — of some flavor (Catholic, Protestant, and the like). Would our military and national defense suffer if less-and-less Christians joined? The left never asks these questions, they merely legislate from emotional stances:
The Blaze has this portion on the matter:
According to a policy statement released by the administration yesterday, President Barack Obama “strongly objects” to provisions in a House defense authorization bill that would prohibit the use of U.S. military property in same-sex marriages and protect military chaplains who refuse to perform gay marriage ceremonies against their religious beliefs.
Arguing that the measure’s “overbroad terms,“ the Obama administration claims such a measure ”is potentially harmful to good order and discipline.”
Commentary Magazine ends their wonderful article on this topic very astutely:
…If President Obama does veto the protections offered to chaplains by the House — as his Office of Management and Budget recommends — then it is possible to envision a future where Catholic, evangelical and Orthodox Jewish clergy will no longer be welcome as military chaplains.
At the American Conservative, Rod Dreher quotes American Jewish Congress chief counsel Marc Stern as saying that, “no one seriously believes that clergy will be forced, or even asked, to perform marriages that are anathema to them.” Yet the “sea change” that same-sex marriage will create in American law will bring with it consequences that advocates for this measure aren’t acknowledging. As Dreher writes:
The strategy of the pro-SSM side seems to be to deny that anything like this could possibly happen, and that people who say it could are being irresponsible scaremongers. Then when it actually happens, they’ll say oh, who cares; those bigots deserve what they get.
Dreher is right. The legal problem here is not so much the direct issue of redefining marriage from the traditional understanding of it being one man and one woman. Rather, it is the implications that stem from government sanction that will redefine some religious believers as being outside of not only mainstream opinion but literally outlaws and vulnerable to prosecution and/or defunding on the grounds of discrimination against gays.
The only way for advocates of same-sex marriage to avoid the stigmatizing of some faiths in this manner is to agree to legal stipulations that remove any possibility that religious institutions could be compelled to sanction behavior their religion regards as immoral. But if they refuse to do so, as the White House is indicating with its opposition to House protections for military chaplains, then gay marriage ceases to be a civil rights issue and becomes the focal point of a kulturkampf in which religious freedom is on the line. If that is the way things are heading, then military chaplains won’t be the last victims in the purge of believers.