This is a note from my friend, Ed Gehringer, father of three adopted children:
 

I'm assuming that anyone who would vote against the amendment is really for gay marriage, or would not mind it if a court decreed that gays could marry.

If that's the case, then my #1 concern is for religious freedom. As I've posted before, when we began our adoptions, we had Catholic Social Ministries do the homestudy. A homestudy involves inquiry into very personal aspects of a couple's lives, and we wanted it to be done by someone who shared our values.

But, in Massachusetts and some parts of Illinois, Catholic Social Ministries (and groups with similar values) are banned from doing adoption homestudies because they won't do them for same-sex couples. This means that conservative Christians who want to adopt must have their homestudy done by someone who does not share their (brand of) faith, and may have serious concerns about some of the other things they believe.

It also means that Christians who want to start adoption agencies must confront the question of what they would do if a same-sex couple wanted them to do a homestudy. There are groups out there who would sue them for declining or demurring.

The bottom line is that willing consumers and providers of service, Christians in this case, are prevented from working together by the threat of legal sanction and litigation.

That's my concern, in a nutshell. I don't want to see Christians of any stripe discriminated against in the helping professions. We already have a discrimination problem in the medical field due to abortion. More and more professions are being walled off to people who follow Christian sexual mores.

Ed Gehringer
Raleigh, NC
 

For more on how same-sex marriage has impacted Massachusetts, click here.

For more on the NC Marriage Protection Amendment, see:  http://tinyurl.com/ncmarriage