Portland, Maine Bishop Richard Malone
on Friday announced that the Roman Catholic church will fight a
proposed gay marriage ballot question with an educational campaign,
the Kennebec
Journal reported.
Malone said that the Diocese of Maine
will not campaign against a fall ballot question proposed by gay
marriage supporters which, if approved, would reverse a 2009 question
that repealed the state's gay marriage law approved by lawmakers.
Instead, the church will teach Catholics about how it defines
marriage.
(Related: Maine
gay marriage question qualifies for ballot.)
“We are going to ask them to
reconsider their understanding of what marriage is,” Malone told
reporters. “So many people in my opinion have forgotten the unique
and particular qualities that must be present to constitute a
marriage, including having the intention of raising a family.”
The centerpiece of the diocese's Beauty
of Marriage campaign is a 24-page pastoral letter written by
Malone.
In one passage, Malone wrote that it is
not discriminatory to deny gay couples the right to marry.
“All of us are sensitive to what are
clearly discriminatory acts or speech, or even appearances of being
unfair or unkind. Today, the cause for the legal recognition of
various human relationships is often equated with non-discrimination,
fairness, equality, and civil rights. But when we say that these
relationships cannot be called marriage by legal definition, we are
not discriminating, but rather, we are marking the obvious and
essential difference between marriage and every other form of
relationship.”
The educational campaign stands in
stark contrast to the $500,000 the diocese contributed to the 2009
campaign to repeal the law.