Pastors Pledge To Stop Signing All Civil Marriage Certificates Because Gays

From First Things:

In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing. In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will become the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with women.

The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman. Our biblical faith is committed to upholding, celebrating, and furthering this understanding, which is stated many times within the Scriptures and has been repeatedly restated in our wedding ceremonies, church laws, and doctrinal standards for centuries. To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles ­articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.

At this writing the pledge is signed by about three dozen clergy members from multiple denominations. Vatican legal advisor Edward Peters (father of former NOM staffer Thomas Peters) thinks this is a bad idea: "This is shocking advice: it amounts to saying: we ministers will not cooperate with dirty state marriage by signing forms, but it’s okay for you laity to cooperate with it by signing forms. What sense does that advice make? If it’s so bad for you to do, how can you send your people off to do it?"

UPDATE: Bryan Fischer is against this pledge too.

Vatican Rep: Suicide At Notre Dame Makes Marriage Opponents Look Like Kooks

"When Dominique Venner killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head inside Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral (indeed, it seems, within the sanctuary itself) he desecrated that great church. If it turns out that Venner killed himself in protest over France’s new 'gay marriage' law, then, besides condemning the classical scandal his deed produced, one may further observe that all he really accomplished was to make opponents of 'gay marriage' look like kooks, and to deprive, for a time, the faithful of France of a particularly powerful place of worship from which to ask God’s help in preserving the natural and holy institution of marriage in their nation. Only the Evil One would take pleasure in that." - Edward Peters, US legal advisor to the Vatican and father of NOM's Thomas Peters.

PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: Last month Edward Peters declared that marriage equality supporters, gay or straight, are not entitled to receive Holy Communion.  In June 2011, Peters said that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is a Catholic, should be turned away for Communion due to the passage of same-sex marriage.