Just thinking about something else...
I really think that the courts will HAVE to side with the Church on this one...
If one commits mortal sins, aren’t they are always denied burial in Catholic cemeteries? As an example, people who commit suicide are denied burial in Catholic cemeteries. I may be wrong, but aren’t homosexual acts considered to be mortal sins as is suicide?
This would completely close the case.
Mark
(I am not a canon lawyer, so if I'm wrong here --- yes, it's possible! --- I will gratefully accept correction.)
What would disqualify a person, would be something objective and public.
Suicide used to bs considered such, but in my lifetime the thinking has swung around that suicides are often not in their right minds, and therefore not fully culpable for their actions. Lamentably, we just buried a 20-year-old suicide from our parish. There is a good presumption he was mentally ill, he had a background of psych treatment.
"Being homosexual" wouldn't disqualify a person from a Catholic funeral and burial in consecrated ground --- most of their sodomitical acts would have been private, which is to say, not displayed to observation, and who knows, the person might have repented on their deathbed--- but Gay "marriage" would, I think. Because of the public nature of marriage: it would be a visible, official, objective, manifest rejection of Catholic faith and morals.
Anybody else who knows the subject better than I do, please chime in.
This HEADSTONE thing, of course, is a public, open, obvious provocation. I agree with tax-chick: the cemetery just has to say No. Finis.
Well, if that’s true, I think the Church would have told them that when they said they wanted a faggot headstone.