It’s interesting to get an inside look at how a major American newspaper forms its editorial positions. For example, here’s an editorial in the Dallas Morning News on the topic of bishops addressing Catholic politicians on their stances on certain moral issues. It seems pretty standard, and in fact it’s not bad, especially this paragraph:
Like many Americans, we instinctively recoil from religious leaders telling secular lawmakers what to do. But how do you judge someone like Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans, who in 1962 excommunicated Catholic lawmakers who tried to prohibit the church from integrating its schools? Would the world have been better off had the good archbishop nd the exclusion from marriage rights for homosexual couples to be “incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy and equality under law.” As a remedy, the Court “refined the common-law meaning of marriage…in light of evolving constitutional standards.” The Court stayed its judgment for 180 days “to permit the Legislature to take such action as it may deem appropriate in light of this opinion.”
As Justice Cordy points out in his dissent, “[O]nly by assuming that ‘marriage’ includes the union of two persons of the same sex does the court conclude that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples infringes on the ‘right of same-sex couples to ‘marry.’”
