In his excellent behind-the-scenes wrap-up on everything that happened to lead up to New York’s passage of Andrew Cuomo’s Marriage Equality Act, the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro noted that “the Catholic Church, arguably the only institution with the authority and reach to derail same-sex marriage, seemed to shrink from the fight.” In the crazed week leading up to the vote, Archbishop Timothy Dolan skipped town for a meeting of bishops in Seattle rather than heading to Albany. A Catholic bishop eventually did go to Albany, but by then it was too late. Although the Church has a well-organized state network (through, well, its churches), it wasn’t mobilized to compete with the field teams of the unified gay-advocacy groups. “We were outgunned,” conceded a Catholic leader.
Dolan, in a blog post today decrying the legalization of same-sex marriages in New York, is a bit defensive on this front:
That said, Dolan has a lot to say about the chaos that is about to be wrought upon us by this change in the law. Specifically, that everyone is going to follow the advice of a gay sex columnist in Seattle:
Because the New York Times writing about a philosophy definitely means it’s going to take over the world, you see. Good news, Scientologists!
Some Afterthoughts [Official site]
