Religion & Law

Over at the America blog, Michael Sean Winters has a useful post up regarding the same-sex-marriage debate in Washington, D.C., and on Archbishop Wuerl's recent statements regarding the Church's teaching, and the traditional understanding, of marriage.  Particularly important, I think, is Winters's response to the canard that such statements, in the context of such a debate, threaten (or, indeed, have anything to do with) the "separation of church and state":

[T]he opposition has begun to throw out straw men and other obfuscations. "I respect the bishop for his view?but we live in a representative democracy where there is a separation of church and state. We do not live in a theocracy," councilman David Catania told the Washington Post. True enough, but no one suggested that we do transform our constitutional arrangements in a theocratic direction. Indeed, Catania?s comments are carefully chosen ? and especially galling - because he and his allies are trying to prevent a referendum on the issue. Ours is a representative democracy, and Catania is a representative, but he should not so scorn the demos, the people, as to deny us a vote on the definition of an institution so central to our lives and society.

Winters's point here is consistent, I think, with the claim (which I *think* all of us here at MOJ would endorse) that there are "moral limits to morals legislation" (as our colleague Fr. Greg Kalscheur has written) and that Christians will often have good (and Christian) reasons for refusing to "legislate [Christian] morality" (as Michael Perry has written).