I wish you would use "public arena otr somesuch instead of "market,"because the word is hypothetical. It remains to e provens whether such a thing exists and if so in any definite form. Government schools and hospitals are also monopolies which are sheltered from the "competition" you talk about. Furthermore they are backed by lobbies who furiously fight any efforts to open their clientele to "competition."
We give exemptions from our laws to the core work of religious institutions so they can do the work of their deities in converting people and maintaining them in their faith. I even question the tax exemption for that, but I'm willing to let the White Aryan Nations Church exclude black people from its congregations, even though I'd like their "church" building on the county tax rolls. Generous of you, but schools and hospitals have been an important part of the Church's mission to the world for many, many years. So they are as much a part of as the "core" as church buildings. Secularists wants to eliminate both because they think that attempts by churches to expand their membership should be greatly curtailed.
As for "social justice", its whatever anybody who wants to impose it on someone else says it is. Back during the Reagan Administration, the RCC was saying that social justice consisted of not building up our military, because it was taking too much welfare away from the poor.
Don't confuse the RCC with the USCCB, the Majority of whom were Democrats and so more interested in the minimum wage than the issue of abortion. Now, some other people's idea of "social justice" is having employers pay for spousal benefits for same-gender relationships, once those relationships declare their exclusivity with at least the same commitment that the average heterosexual enters into marriage with. Does this offend the Catholic sense of propriety? No doubt, but it probably offends their sense of decency to pay spousal benefits to people who have been divorced and remarried, too. But that's the way the game gets played Our society, at least in Massachusetts, is starting to broaden the definition of what is a committed couple.
And How IS the game played? By allowing a narrow majority of a state high court to dictate public policy? Fromn that decision has come the order to JPs that they MUST marry homosexuals or lose their licenses. Can it be far down the road when in the name of "fairness: that priests and ministers be given the same choice, so that no one can be validly married in the Church? This is, of course, autocracy or whatever the name one gives to rule by judges. The game was up when the AG of Massachusetts agreed to abide by what is obviously an abuse of power by the High Court. Only a government staked with lawyers would ever confuse rule by judges with "the rule of law."In a tripartite government, indeep rather expressly in the Massachusetts Constitution, the judicary is the last among equals. The failure of the executive to exercise its right to interpret the Constitution is a failure of will. As for law changes, you either change with it, or go out of business. That's the way that environmental law, tax law, and worker safety law all work, and the RCC has always fought hard for changes in those areas, no matter what it cost employers, either in terms of cash or philosophical beliefs.
One does not go along with changes that do in effect force it to go out of business. Business spends billions of dollars each year lobbying government every year to make things go their way. The RCC, therefore, has better join forces with other organization such as the SBC, to fight what is happening tooth and nail. Except they are kept from doing this, are they not by, by election laws that prohibit them from endorsing politicians who see things their way? At least that is the way that the ACLU and much of the judiciary see the matter.
As to whether marriage is meaningless or not, that's pretty much up to the people in each particular marriage to make that relationship either a source of strength and value in their lives, or to make it a sham that eventually is broken. A gay couple across town that either chooses to live together, get a civil union, or get a marriage certificate has no bearing on the marriage that my wife and I have. Our marriage is either sanctified or cheapened by our own behavior toward each other, no one else's relationship has any effect on ours, if we don't let it.
This is your own peculiar way of looking at marriage. Marriage is and always has been a social institution, whose form and content, is pretty much independent of what individual couples think about it. This is like saying that a partnerships is what two individuals have shaken hands on. Marriage is at minimum a contract and so government by the law of contract. Whatever shape it has is imposed on the couple. The individual contribution is having entered into the contract voluntarily. The same is true of marriage viewed as a Sacrament. The grace comes from without. As for the market for medical services not being a totally free market, I'll agree. But you recognize that there is a market for labor services provided to hospitals and schools, and it is a free market, at least a far freer one. The spousal benefits discussed in this thread are a part of the compensation package that employers extend to employees in trade for their services, and there's a fundamental question of fairness when one class of institutions is treated unequally over another, with regard to paying benefits required by law. If it's just a custom in Massachusetts for a hospital or a school to pay spousal benefits, then the employer should be able to set whatever rules they want to on it.
"Fairness"is a bunch of baloney. The purpose of the law is to discriminate and it sure does.
That employer should also be willing to deal with whatever consequences that result, too. Once upon a time, before housing discrimination was outlawed, you couldn't get a Federally insured mortgage on a house in an area that had racial restrictions in the deeds.
Again, epmployers fight like hell to avoid such consequences. They is why they employlawyers, lobbyists and accountants.
The question of whether or not "side" activities of churches are the same as the "core" missions of these churches has been long settled. If you think it's not, then you should see how the IRS has regarded an employee of a hospital or school treating their income as that from the ministry, if that particular person is not a member of a religious order, doing the work for room, board, and a pittance. The independence that is nominally asserted by such organizations is what makes them eligible for government funds from scholarships and Medicare/Medicaid.
I'll admit that certain activist groups that claim the title of "Catholic" have been the moving forces in getting socially-based legislation passed, but the non-liberal laity and the hierarchy have done little to prevent them from using a Catholic moral perspective to enter the debate on the treatment of workers or the environment, so they are subject to whatever this social activism has produced as a by-product. It does seem quite ironic that it has come around to bite them on the posterior.
You can argue about the unfairness of Supreme Court decisions, and that's certainly a legitimate angle of attack, but Catholic-backed positions have come down on the side of such judicial activism when it has suited them. If the Roe vs. Wade decision had gone the other way, the Catholic bishops would have hailed the Court as the defenders of liberty. As long as Supreme Court justices on the Federal and some State levels are appointed for life, you will have this sort of unaccountability that leads to judicial tyranny.
By the way a Justice of the Peace is a state-created office, a clergy member of a particular religion is not. We've always demanded equality from tax-paid public officials, we assert none of these claims against religious organizations. They are, and have been, and always will be free to define the tenets of their faith, whether or not those tenets are in the mainstream of American society.
Case in point: the Mormon church kept black men out of their innermost priesthood (something that every male in that faith aspires to be a member of) until about 1977. The civil rights battles of the sixties had long been fought and won, and it was only change occurring within the Mormon faith that changed this. Women are still second class citizens in that faith, and many others, and there is no governmental process going on to gain equality for them in any religious organization.
By the way, religious organizations are the only non-profits that may espouse political views and still keep their tax exempt status. Most try to do so in a non-partisan-looking way, to avoid being added to the list.
I have no argument with your comments on marriage as a sacrament, but we're talking about marriage as a government-sanctioned institution that confers benefits and responsibilities on its participants. Each church should keep "marriage the sacrament" as holy and as pure as it wants to. "Marriage the social contract" is changing, and has changed. In 1964, during his potential run for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller came under media scrutiny because he was married to a woman who had been divorced. A mere sixteen years later, we elected a Republican man who had been divorced as our President, and nobody seemed to mind very much. During all that time, and since, the Catholic church has been able to keep its teachings on divorce and remarriage completely intact.
I'm hoping that the current dilemma faced by the Catholic church causes it to rethink its stands on judicial activism, and the candidates who support judicial activists on the bench. Few things in life are not a two-edged sword.