The government won’t be forcing preachers to show up at their Southern Baptist church in Texas, or anywhere else, and perform marriages that they don’t want to.
They can’t even make a Catholic Priest marry a Lutheran and a Methodist.
They will. That’s what this is all about.
When you have a protected class (gays) and a law that says refusal to provide a service to this protected class is a crime, then you can insist that the service providers offer the protected class all the “services” that they offer to others. If marriage is defined as something that is a service to be offered to everyone, regardless of the fact that traditionally it was not offered to persons of the same sex and has never been offered to those people by the churches, you can then insist that the churches provide this service.
The government may not be able to force the Catholics or Baptists to do this, but they’re certainly going to try and I honestly expect them to use threats of imprisonment or seizure of property to enforce this.
The bizarre thing is that being married in church is not legally necessary even now. If gays want to have a sham marriage in front of a willing JP, they are certainly free to do so in many states, and that’s all they need. The church and the clergy simply constitute the witnesses that are required by the state and would be found in any registry office or even Vegas “wedding chapel” or JP marriage in somebody’s garden.
The Catholic Church has a sacramental understanding of marriage, but that obviously depends on whether you accept it or not, and affects only Catholics who accept it and want to be married in a church wedding. Since none of these people by defnition would be gays, the state shouldn’t have any interest in who the Church offers the service of marriage to. But the state sees the Church as a threat to its power, and that’s why it wants to force “gay marriage” on the churches.
The long and short of it is that there is no need, even in terms of “non-discrimination,” for the state to force churches to perform marriage ceremonies for gays...but the state is obviously going to do so, because destroying the church is very important to the left.