Catholic Church Issues Ultimatum To DC: Allow Us To Discriminate Against Gays Or We Won't Feed Or Shelter The Homeless

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington DC has issued an ultimatum to Washington DC, saying if marriage equality is approved without an exemption for them, they will end all their social service programs including food and shelter for the homeless, adoption programs, and public health services.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city. "If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."

Several D.C. Council members said the Catholic Church is trying to erode the city's long-standing laws protecting gay men and lesbians from discrimination. The clash escalates the dispute over the same-sex marriage proposal between the council and the archdiocese, which has generally stayed out of city politics. Catholic Charities, the church's social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington's homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church. City leaders said the church is not the dominant provider of any particular social service, but the church pointed out that it supplements funding for city programs with $10 million from its own coffers.

Rather than exempt the Archdiocese from the law, openly gay city council member David Catania says he'd just as soon cut the city's ties to the church. "They don't represent, in my mind, an indispensable component of our social services infrastructure," said Catania.