Members of the Lansing-area Catholic community are reflecting on the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that said banning same-sex unions is unconstitutional.
During Thanksgiving weekend, Massachusetts Catholic churches read a statement from the state's Catholic Conference regarding same-sex marriages.
Now, as the church enters the season of Advent, a period regarded as a time of preparation, Catholic officials are educating their congregations on the issues.
"Marriage for us is a complementary union," said the Rev. John Fain, associate pastor at St. Gerard Church in Lansing.
But Fain said these views on marriage aren't just from religious doctrine, they're grounded in philosophy.
"We believe people should come to the same conclusions we do without religion," he said. "The fundamental unit is the family, constituted by a married couple in a complementary union."
He said this philosophy rests in natural law, which says the natural world has an order to it.
"Marriage is a gift of God which, in its natural order, allows for the growth of the human family and society," the statement said.
Locally, the Diocese of Lansing released a statement in late November regarding the church's stance on the Massachusetts ruling, but they haven't said anything about the Federal Marriage Amendment yet.
The amendment, introduced to the Senate last Tuesday, said "families consisting of the legal union of one man and one woman for the purpose of bearing and raising children remains the basic unit of our civil society." It indicated that the power to regulate marriage lies in the legislative branch and not in the judiciary branch.
Most of the decisions regarding same-sex unions in the United States, however, have been initiated by a court decision. Members of the area lesbian, bi, gay and transgender community say they go through the courts when efforts to use the legislature have failed.
Fain said his church hasn't issued a stance on the federal amendment yet because they're cautious about the legislation's wording.
"Certain Christian groups have a very negative understanding of homosexuals as people," he said. "We are totally against discrimination against homosexuals, so if an amendment contained any language against them, we would be against it."
Lansing Community College student Chris Szmadzinski said he knows a lot of gay-friendly Catholics.
"The problem we run across is that it seems a lot of people within the church aren't at that level of accepting marriage yet," he said. "It's about getting them to the level of respecting people at all levels before they begin to respect marriage."
Fain said there was a delicate line in allowing LBGT people full rights without marriage, and Mike Liberato, staff liaison for the St. John's Student Parish LBGT student group, agreed.
"There are so many questions up in the air whether gay unions are understood as a married relationship or not," said Liberato, who also is the director of student faith formation.
"The key thing is that we respect all persons and that everybody has the full dignity of their humanity," Liberato said. "We see them truly as no different from anybody else. The church does not condemn orientation; it is not something you can decide or not decide."
