{"id":182,"date":"2011-03-01T10:23:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/how-long-will-bishops-fight-ssm.html"},"modified":"2011-03-01T10:23:51","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:23:51","slug":"how-long-will-bishops-fight-ssm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/how-long-will-bishops-fight-ssm.html","title":{"rendered":"How long will bishops fight SSM?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Maryland Catholic Conference, summoning its flock<\/a>
\nto keep America’s original Catholic colony from adopting same-sex
\nmarriage, thanked “the thousands of Maryland Catholics who have raised
\ntheir voices in
\nrecent weeks in support of our society’s foundational institution – the
\nunion of one man and one woman in marriage.” The problem for the bishops
\nin Maryland and beyond is that most Catholics are on the other side of
\nthe issue.<\/p>\n

Running the latest numbers from the General Social Survey, Darren Sherkat finds<\/a>
\nthat American Catholics now support SSM by a margin of 47 percent to 35
\npercent. This margin is twice that in the country as a whole, which for
\nthe first time in 2010 tilted in favor<\/a> of SSM. No wonder that leading Republicans did not go nuts<\/a>
\nwhen President Obama abandoned his defense of the constitutionality of
\nthe Defense of Marriage Act last week. They know when a wedge has lost
\nits edge.<\/p>\n

It’s all well and good for the National Association of Evangelicals to keep the anti-SSM faith<\/a>. Evangelicals are by far the religious community most wedded to traditional marriage–possibly because their marriages end so much more frequently<\/a> in divorce. But with their own rank and file off the reservation, what are poor Catholic prelates to do<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Presumably,
\nas with contraception and liberalized divorce, they will subside into
\nsilence, or at any rate political quiescence. Here in Connecticut, where
\nSSM is ensconced beyond dislodging, even the excitable Bishop Lori
\ndoesn’t waste his breath about how it is bringing civilization as we
\nknow it to an end in the Land of Steady Habits. <\/p>\n

That said, it
\nmight be prudent for the church’s powers to give some real thought to
\nestablishing a principled difference between the social policy of the
\nchurch and the social policy of a pluralistic society. I’m not a fan of
\nthe doctrine of Scandal, but it really does drag the hierarchy into
\ndisrepute when its views diverge widely from the consensus fidelium<\/i>.
\nAt any rate, it’s more likely that the laity will accept the church’s
\nviews of marriage if they don’t think it wants to impose them on society
\nat large.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Maryland Catholic Conference, summoning its flock to keep America’s original Catholic colony from adopting same-sex marriage, thanked “the thousands of Maryland Catholics who have raised their voices in recent weeks in support of our society’s foundational institution – the union of one man and one woman in marriage.” The problem for the bishops in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nHow long will bishops fight SSM? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/03\/how-long-will-bishops-fight-ssm.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How long will bishops fight SSM? 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}