The Roman Catholic Church in Illinois
has begun rolling out a campaign to kill a gay marriage bill in
Illinois.
Chief sponsors of the bill said last
week that they will push for a vote next month during the General
Assembly's lame-duck session.
Rep. Greg Harris, along with two other
openly gay representatives, Deb Mell and Kelly Cassidy, introduced
the marriage bill in February. Harris was also the primary sponsor
of Illinois' civil unions law.
“The timing is right for us to push
this,” Harris said on Thursday.
Governor Pat Quinn said this week that
he hopes to sign the marriage bill into law.
Last month, Catholic Conference of
Illinois, the policy arm of the Catholic Church in Illinois, issued a
Marriage
Toolkit, in which it outlined resources and talking points on the
issue for Catholics.
Most of the resources listed come from
the church itself, such as the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops' (USCCB) Marriage
Unique for a Reason website. Also promoted is the Ruth
Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM),
whose founder and president, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, has argued
that marriage equality is mostly about making gay
couples feel “a certain way” and would allow “mentally
unstable” heterosexuals to marry someone of the same sex.
“If you just think about the future
of a society, there really isn't any future in sodomy,” Morse
recently told supporters in a podcast. “Sodomy cannot produce
children. So that's a little odd to say that we're on the wrong side
of history, they're on the right side of history.”
Robert Gilligan, executive director of
Catholic Conference of Illinois, told the AP that his group opposes
marriage equality because “same-sex marriage goes against nature.”