[hunter112]

Sorry, the use of the word "market" doesn't seem appropriate to you, and perhaps on the consumer side, it is not fully appropriate, for the reasons you stated. On the labor side, "market" does indeed define the competition among employers for qualified employees.

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.

[RobbyS]

One thing to consider is that American law, especially on its positive side, can't decide whether churches are priveleged institutions or not. The First Amendment, taken literally, does not allow Congress to legislate on religious matters at all. The states were allowed to retain the authority to establish a church. By the 1830s, of course,because of the impracticality of preferring one Protestant sect to another but also because of the tremendous growth of Church membership between 1800 and 1850,there was an unofficial establishment of all these bodies. Between Protestant bodies no discrimination was allowed and because of the rise of evangelicalism, differences of religious dogma became unimportant, and of course distinctions between Protestant clergymen became blurred and were based more on social distinction than on doctrine. Episcopal bishops, for instance, became part of the ruling class because their parishioners were largely members of the ruling class.

The Catholic Church, of course, did not fit. I won't get into the history of the rise of the power of the Church--a power that was entirely separate from the power of the Protestant bodies--but by 1947 the power of the Catholic bishops was enough to worry the ruling classes of the United States. The ruling class was determined not to allow the bishops to get federal funding for parochial schools, a possibility raised by the GI Bill, which did not discriminate against religious colleges.

Hugo Black, however, backed by some precedent but not enough to be conclusive, because he was in a rush to judgement, came up with a definition of "establishment" that no founding father, not Jefferson, not John Marshall, who was as anti-clerical as they come, would have accepted. Like the privacy right in Roe, it is an example of pure positivism.
Black did it because he and the majority on the Court hated the Catholic Church or, to put it more precisely, the Catholic hierarchy and wanted to stop the bishops from getting federal funds for the parochial schools So, just as the Massachusetts judges just did, by judicial fiat they amended the Constitution.

This, in my opinion, was very different from the Brown case, where the Court by a backward flip, got out of the corner earlier Courts had painted them into with the Plessy decision and most subsequent decisions. Warren reminds me of Lincoln. Lincoln could think of no real authority for the Emancipation Proclamation but he knew that he had to do it anyway. Ditto Warren. The whole purpose of the 14th Amendmrnt was to bring blacks under the proection of the Federal Government and to prevent the states from screwing them to the wall. So he came up with an opinion that persuaded no one but which had force because it attended a 9-0 decision. As a matter of law, no worse place could have a worse place to start than the public schools, since no one in 1867 had any notion of integrated schools. BUT, got to star somewhere, and of course,that would be with the case before them. The Civil Rights leaders grabbed the ball and ran with it, quite out of the control of the courts or anyone else. The Court, of course, had to go along, since their intention was to implement the 14th Amendment.

Anyway, the ruling class had no such tender feelings for the Catholic Church. Not that the Church had not tried. Catholics were part of the New Deal coalition and Roosevelt appointed almost as many Catholic judges as he did Jewish ones. Catholics were strongly represented also in the labor unions, another part of the coalition. Ditto Catholic political bosses. All of this was enough to get John Kennedy elected president in 1960.

But a new day was dawning. Some of the judges-e.g. Brennan--were anti-clericals and even liberals. Ditto many polticos. They disliked the deference that ordinary Catholics paid to the bishops. As a matter of fact, so did many priests, especially those in the colleges. Vatican II was the occasion for a rebellion against the bishops. The rebellion exploded when the pope issued his encyclical Humanae Generis, which re-asserted the traditional Catholic teachings on birth control (and abortion). Priests and seminarians bailed out by the thousands, something was uthinkable twenty years before.

Some bishops, maybe many, were likewise in rebellion, this time against Rome. After Roe came down, the bishops dutifully denounced abortion--but not too loudly--and in the new USCCB followed the path that came naturally to mst of them, the children of Democratic voters, and spent more time supporting the agenda of thew Democratic Party than they did on more painful subjects, such as contraception and abortion. Many priests quietly undermined the stated position of the bishops on matters of sexual morality but went all out in support of the political agenda of the bishops.

Sorry to rattle on like this, but I want you to know how it is that the USCCB came to be an arm of the Democratic Party.
Since 1972. however, that party has been taken over by people who hate eerything that the Catholic Church stands for, and the bishops have, pitfully, been trying to win them over by carrying their water on matters that have nothing to do with sexual morality, including, of course, nuclear disarmament.

By the 1980s, the older Protestant Churchs had lost their social power, but evangelcial bodies, such as SBC, were
in vororout growth. The Pro-life movement had at first been a Catholic thing, but now it ws joined by the evangelicals.
All of a sudden,evangelical leaders began to act like the more vigorous bishops of old, or at least like the evanglical leaders of the 19th Century. Now liberals began to talk darkly about "theocracy." They had captured the "mainstream" bodies, but the evangicals were a challenge to their power. They were now in full possesion of the Democratic Party and enjoyed the support of a substantial minority in the Republican Party. They enjoy the support of a majority of the judiciary and the legal profession as a whole. Hence what we see now is a full court press to revolutionize the relationships between the churches and American society by transforming the law.