by Mark Pattison

BALTIMORE (CNS) – The Supreme Court’s ruling that rendered the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional and the Senate’s passage Nov. 7 of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) put the legal defense of marriage “at a critical point in this country,” said the archbishop who heads the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee on the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.

The Supreme Court’s DOMA decision is now being used to judicially challenge marriage laws in more than a dozen states that still recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman,” said Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco.

The effects of ENDA, Archbishop Cordileone said during a Nov. 11 presentation at the U.S. bishops’ fall general meeting in Baltimore, “go much further” than preventing employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity to the point where “ENDA-like laws have contributed to the erosion and redefinition of marriage at the state level.”

The bishops though voted 203-17, with five abstentions, to extend through 2016 a “Call to Prayer for Life, Marriage and Religious Freedom.”

Archbishop Cordileone said “The legal and practical implications are significant, implicating the more than 1,100 federal statutes in which marital status is a factor for determining rights, benefits and privileges.”

One remedy, he said, could come in the form of the Marriage and Religious Freedom Act, which would bar the federal government from discriminating against those who “act upon their religiously motivated belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage.”