Problem Solving 101
Washington, D.C. is the latest area to legalize same-sex marriage and this has caused a problem for Catholic Diocese of Washington. They’ve threatened to quite doing humanitarian work in Washington, D.C. but I guess the backlash and the taxpayer subsidies are too much to pass up. The Catholic diocese of Washington has found a unique solution to their problem of offering benefits to legally recognized spouses – they won’t offer spousal benefits for anyone.
Employees at Catholic Charities were told Monday that the social services organization is changing its health coverage to avoid offering benefits to same-sex partners of its workers — the latest fallout from a bitter debate between District officials trying to legalize same-sex marriage and the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington.
Starting Tuesday, Catholic Charities will not offer benefits to spouses of new employees or to spouses of current employees who are not already enrolled in the plan. A letter describing the change in health benefits was e-mailed to employees Monday, two days before same-sex marriage will become legal in the District.
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Catholic Charities, which receives $22 million from the city for social service programs, protested in the run-up to the council’s December vote to allow same-sex marriage, saying that it might not be able to continue its contracts with the city, including operating homeless shelters and facilitating city-sponsored adoptions. Being forced to recognize same-sex marriage, church officials said, could make it impossible for the church to be a city contractor because Catholic teaching opposes such unions.
After the council voted to legalize gay marriage, Catholic Charities last month transferred its foster-care program — 43 children, 35 families and seven staff members — to another provider, the National Center for Children and Families.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. First of all, it will create two classes of married people in the Washington Diocese – those that had a spouse enrolled in a health plan and newer employees/newly-married employees. Second, this will be a real hardship for people. Only 59% of employers nationwide offer health insurance to their employees, so a significant number of people will suffer – stay-at-home spouses not previously covered, newly unemployed spouses and new spouses without health insurance from their employer. Also, it’s possible it could hurt the recruitment of employees in the long run if people can not insure their spouses.
Tags: Same Sex Marriage, Washington D.C.
I’m Catholic.I think the church should have quietly ignored the fact that there were employees lovingly united in a same sex marriage.If it came to light:”I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”-Captain Renault
How often does this really happen?
People who give a lot of lip service to the importance of families, actually enshrine as policy their real disdain for those families. Since all of those families are getting in the way of their effort to institutionalize their bigotry.
WWJD indeed.
The Catholic Church acting mighty Christian as usual.
The real victims here are the people who benefit from those church programs that will soon be understaffed as people choose other employment offers with spousal benefits.
Kicking their future/current unmarried employees (who may marry in the future) AND the people they serve in the gut. What an awful double whammy.
If they wanted to, the Church could certainly recognize the secular legal status of a same-sex spouse without considering them to be “married” according to Church teaching.
According to Church teaching, divorced people who remarry aren’t really married either.
Once again, this is a shameful and disgusting attack on the foundation of society. We need a Constitutional Amendment to protect marriage from the loony left.
Once again, a proposal that does nothing to alter “traditional” marriage cannot, outside of the minds of paranoids, be considered an “attack” on that institution.
I thought the foundation of society was rugged individualism. Or was it the church? Or was it the founding fathers? The family unit?
Since when is the foundation of society wrapped up in a type of marriage that has varied from culture to culture and century to century?
Hell, one could say that this country was built on slavery, is that the foundation that we are talking about?
The intellectual and legal foundation of US society is the rights of the individual. No amount of wingnuttery can change that.