Minnesota Archbishop John C. Nienstedt sends out another letter stating the church’s support for the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.  According to reports, many people reacted by walking out of the parishes and churches where the letter was read (which included the Basilica of St. Mary).

Are you Catholic and voting no? Number 1: I love you, and Number 2: you can get your “Another Catholic voting NO!” lawn signs by contacting Mary Kay Orman at c4me.stpaul@gmail.com (St. Paul) and Michael Bayly at info.c4me@gmail.com or call 612-201-4534 (Minneapolis).

“But the reality is that marriage is not ours to redefine,” said Nienstedt, the man at the head of the organization that once led the charge to redefine marriage by making interracial marriage legal. Yes, it was a coalition of Catholic bishops that helped support Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case which ended anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. in 1967. We call upon that very same spirit of support today, and the language from that decision:

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law… Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Archbishop Nienstedt, you are not only holding positions that are on the wrong side of history, you are promoting division, misunderstandings, misconceptions and causing unnecessary heartache and family divisions that are contrary to the history of your own Church’s actions and teachings, as well as to the very nature of the country in which you live.

Archbishop Nienstedt: if you can’t stand for love, then it’s time to stand down as the leader of the organization that claims to represent love.