By Tom Strode, Baptist Press
WASHINGTON (BP) — The Southern Baptist Convention’s religious freedom entity has told the U.S. Supreme Court the time to rule on same-sex marriage has arrived.
The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) joined four other faith organizations representing tens of millions of Americans in a Sept. 4 brief urging the justices not to delay in deciding the constitutional status of marriage between people of the same sex. If the high court agrees to review one or more lower-court decisions on the issue in this term, it likely would announce a ruling before it adjourns next summer.
“The time has come to end the divisive national debate as to whether the Constitution mandates same-sex marriage,” the ERLC and its allies say in the brief. The current legal ambiguity is burdening religious organizations and people of faith, they say.
“The American people deserve to know whether [the Supreme Court] deems same-sex marriage a fundamental right beyond the reach of democratic majorities” among voters and state legislatures, according to the brief.
The ERLC, which opposes legalizing same-sex marriage, welcomed the opportunity to petition the justices on the issue at this time, said its president, Russell D. Moore.
“We are happy to speak to the Court in this brief because much is at stake in the question of marriage,” Moore told Baptist Press in a written statement. “No human court engineered marriage in the first place, and no human court should deconstruct it.”
The ERLC joined the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the brief.
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It’s about time we get on our own side here, if things keep going the way they are now, churches will be sued for not perfoming gay weddings and people will target them just for that reason alone. I’m for civil unions across the board, leave marriage to the churches. With a 50% divorce rate it’s kind of a joke anyway and most people marry in churches, so we need to clean up our kind first, Christians should lead the way on this.
I’m also glad to see these different churches working together, for a common cause. The worse the world gets, the more we’ll need each other.