DISCLAIMER // MBCC's "Thoughts for the Pews" is meant to encourage faithful and passionate discourse around issues of politics, culture, life and faith. While this piece has been been approved for posting by a member of the pastoral staff, the opinion/s of the writer are not necessarily those of MBCC.
[image: femgeek]
Ban the Catholic Eucharist
by Ryan Roser
We good Protestants should join together and ask the State of California to eliminate the right of Catholics to take Eucharist, for when those people are able to join together in communion it devalues and debases our traditional, wholesome, Hawaiian-bread-and-Concord-grape-juice Protestant Eucharist. Now, we won't ban Catholicism, of course. We tolerate Catholics. They can keep dressing in their gaudy outfits, and have their all male hangouts, and believe whatever they want, but let's not let them continue to corrupt our Eucharist. What do you say? Obviously, the argument is absurd and offensive, yet in this past election many intelligent, well-intentioned Christians used this same argument to eliminate the right of homosexuals to marry.
Suggesting that gay marriage reduces the value of "traditional" marriage is as reasonable as supposing that allowing Catholics to take communion somehow diminishes the value of the Presbyterian Eucharist, or that allowing a Muslim to believe in and worship Allah will reduce the value of a Christian's belief and worship of Jesus. Prop 8 does not defend traditional marriage. It does not defend anything. It is an attack. With Prop 8, California has declared that, while a minority group can believe what it wants, its ability to act in no extraordinary way on its own beliefs is subject to regulation by the majority, even the slimmest 50%+1 majority.
I assume that many who voted Yes on 8 did so because they believe gay marriage to be wrong, immoral, and that the churches and pastors who supported the ban did so primarily on these grounds as well. Now, I have no desire to debate what is moral, in fact I feel strongly that it is the place of a church to define what is and is not moral according to its creed. But I do expect that churches and pastors are capable of distinguishing between legality and morality. From Pilgrim to Mormon, America's history recounts the times and people who struggled to free themselves from a religious morality based majority made law. The churches and pastors that support Prop 8 know this history and owe their current freedoms to these struggles. In supporting Prop 8 they knowingly become the oppressor they have fought to escape.
Churches operate from a unique position of authority and privilege. I do not want to see America's churches abuse their power regardless of my view on a particular issue. Our nation relies upon the separation of church and state to help allow all of us to live side by side, harmoniously, while maintaining well reasoned but conflicting view points. It saddens me when churches attempt to legislate their views. Somehow they have forgotten the long hard fight that was necessary for their own current freedom of conscious and freedom of expression.
We as churchgoers should take care to protect and abide by the laws that allow churches to operate as they do. We should not abuse our power. We should also call out those churches who go beyond the law, flaunting and jeopardizing the systems that maintain the freedoms we enjoy. We should fight to protect the legality of minority belief and practice, for in doing so we defend our own rights.
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