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To: RonF
She's not referring to the Bishop as being a civil servant. She's saying that the Bishop has no business telling a civil servant (Worcester City Clert David Rushmore) that said civil servant is in league with evil if he follows the law and grants marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Which to me (and I'm not even Roman Catholic) is absurd. The woman seems to think that the First Amendment means that anyone in government or that has any public influence should completely divorce any religiously-formed moral sense from their actions in government.

Ron, perhaps you are correct in who she is referencing in her statement. The Bishop is giving a reminder, not an excommunication, and as such performing his pastoral duty.

The matter is hardly politically settled in that state and a civil servant may justly await more settled times. Once settled, the civil servant may resign or uphold his sworn oath, little else. Only a legislator may resort to notions of Natural Law, God's Law, historical ethics and morals and the like in performing his duty to write and vote for Laws of the State. Others must set aside their own sensibilities and proprieties, if they can do so, and perform their sworn office. If they can't do that, they should resign. Their is no "duty" to "represent" by general interpretation for such offices.

Only legislatures are meant to be deliberative. Others should act on settled law, to do otherwise is to depart from the Rule of Law.

52 posted on 05/25/2004 10:28:06 AM PDT by KC Burke (Men of intemperate minds can never be free....)
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To: KC Burke
The matter is hardly politically settled in that state and a civil servant may justly await more settled times. Once settled, the civil servant may resign or uphold his sworn oath, little else.

There is a third option; civil disobedience, wherein someone refuses to obey a law they believe to be unjust, and accepts the civil penalties that are then imposed. But there is no imperative to do so. I suspect that what will mostly happen is that either granting same-sex marriage licenses will not offend the moral sensibilities of most civil servants whose job it would be to do so (in which case, if they profess to be Roman Catholic, they are properly chastized by their Bishop); or, if they state that their personal morality is offended by doing so, they'll use some "church/state separation" concept to rationalize keeping their job.

75 posted on 05/25/2004 12:11:43 PM PDT by RonF
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