(www.RemnantNewspaper.com)  It appears as if Maryland, a state founded by Catholics, named for the Catholic queen consort of Britain’s King Charles I, site of the first Catholic Mass in the British colonies, and one in which nearly 30 percent of the residents are Catholics, is about to legalize homosexual “marriage.” The term is an oxymoron, of course, but leftists never let logic and objective truth impede their ideological cant. And like the abortion issue, it appears as if Catholic politicians will decide the issue, from the governor to the leaders of Maryland’s General Assembly.

The bill recently cleared the Judiciary Committee of the House of Delegates, and before that, passed the Maryland Senate, 25-21. In the run-up to that contentious vote, The Washington Post provided the correct headline over a story describing the debate and the role Catholic politicians played in validating sodomite “marriage:” “Md.’s top leaders cross Catholic hierarchy on gay marriage.”

According to the pro-homo Post, “Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley regularly attends a weekday Mass and has sent his four children to Catholic schools.”

House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) used to teach and coach at his old Catholic high school in Annapolis.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) grew up serving as an altar boy in the idyllic wood-frame Catholic church his family helped build in Clinton.

But the presence of three Catholics at the helm in Annapolis hasn't stopped a same-sex marriage bill from wending its way through the legislature, triggering deep disappointment among church leaders as it suggests a waning of Catholic influence in this heavily Catholic state.

Yes, it does suggest that, and the article reveals, by quoting these men, how poorly catechized the modern Catholic leader is.

Here is O’Malley:

The vocation I’ve chosen for these last several years has been a vocation that requires one to be of service to others in an arena of compromise. It is a different vocation than the vocation that a bishop or a cardinal chooses to fulfill, and rightfully so.

O’Malley, the Post reports, trots out a list of liberal causes he thinks Catholic teaching enjoins him to support, and “has come to view gay nuptials as a matter of ‘equal protection under the law.’ It is one of several issues in which he is not ‘in sync’ with the Catholic hierarchy.”

“Their job is to guard the tenets of the faith, and, you know, it's understandable that the church, for that reason, that they're slow to change,” he said.

So because O’Malley is not a bishop, he has the right and indeed the obligation to set aside objective moral truth when he makes public policy. Any minimally educated Catholic knows that all human beings, regardless of “vocation,” have a positive duty to affirm objective moral truth, and that the government has a duty to ensure that laws reflect that truth. They also know that evil has no rights. But Catholic politicians agree with O’Malley, who modestly bills himself as “a fearless, intelligent public servant.” He does not claim to be minimally educated Catholic.

Sen. Robert J. Garagiola told the Post that homosexuals will get the “same rights” as he and his wife. “It’s an historic day for equal justice under the law,” he said. He’s right about that. What to homosexuals do in a bathhouse, the law says, is no different than what a married man and woman do when they create life.

Apostate Catholic Busch told the Post that the nuns who schooled him imparted “a value system of honesty, integrity, hard work and discipline.”

Busch said he considers himself Catholic, adding that “one day I hope they’re going to bury me a Catholic.” He would not say how often he attends church, offering only that “I’m not a guy who makes every Sunday.”

Busch said he largely agrees with the church on issues such as supporting the poor and expanding access to health care. He has parted ways on others, including abortion and embryonic stem-cell research funding, which Maryland lawmakers approved in 2006.

“I don’t think I’m unlike a lot of other members of the Catholic religion,” Busch said.

No doubt about that. Indeed, he is not unlike a lot of teachers in Catholic schools, as Busch once was, the Post informs readers. Naturally, Busch peddled the non-sequitur that opposing homosexual “marriage” is tantamount to “hatred.” “In wrestling with the same-sex marriage issue,” the Post reported, “he said he has asked himself how he would respond if one of his daughters told him she was a lesbian. ‘Do you love them any less? You love them the same. You want the best for them.’”

Yes, but truly loving them, this man educated by nuns should know, also means instructing them properly and not encouraging them to sin. Clearly, Busch must not have learned the nine ways of being an accessory to another’s sin: by counsel, by command, by consent, by provocation, by praise or flattery, by concealment, by partaking, by silence and by defense of the ill done. A bill such as this subsumes them all.

Then the Post informs us about Miller, who is against homosexual marriage and says his mother pushed him to vote for abortion. “Miller said his mother told him that ‘it was a women's issue and that I needed to support the women.’”

Miller also admits he’s “not a very good Catholic despite regular attendance at churches in his district.” Well, listening to what Miller believes, at least one can say he is honest. “I think we should have women for priests,” he told the Post. “I think there should be contraception to stop the spread of AIDs in Africa. I support capital punishment, and I'm pro-choice in the early stages of pregnancy.”

One wonders why, then, he opposes sodomite marriage, and Miller happily explains: “It’s not really a Catholic thing,” he told the Post. “I have a hard time associating family values with people of the same sex being married. What is the next definition of marriage going to be? At some point, you have to draw the line.”

Another Catholic clown represents Catholics from my hometown and attends Mass, apparently, at a church I attend occasionally when I travel home: Immaculate Conception. Sen. James Brochin said it was the “hate” that caused him to vote for sodomite marriage. Brochin called the bill’s opponents “appalling,”, and claimed that during a seven-hour hearing on the bill, “Witness after witness demonized homosexuals, vilified the gay community and described gays and lesbians as pedophiles.” So Brochin now supports homosexual “marriage.”

For me, the transition to supporting marriage has not been an easy one, but the uncertainty, fear and second-class status that gays and lesbians have to put up with is far worse and clearly must come to an end.

Actually, it’s apostates Catholics such as like Brochin calling themselves Catholic that “must come to an end,” but in any event, even more interesting than who supported this bill — Catholics who should know better — are those who opposed it.

For the record, not all Catholics in the Maryland legislature supported the bill. Del. Michael Hough of Frederick voted against it.

Opposition also came from some liberal black Protestants. Said Sen. C. Anthony Muse, the pastor of Ark of Safety Christian Church, “Here’s my question: Where does it stop?” Muse rightly observed that if homosexuals can “marry,” then legalized polygamy will not be far behind.

Another black senator who voted against the bill is Joanne C. Benson. She told the Post “she grew up watching her father officiate over weddings and came to believe that such unions should be reserved for people who can have children. ‘Two people of the same sex cannot produce children,’ she said.” Clearly, Mrs. Benson, hardly a right-winger, needs some sensitivity and tolerance training from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Del. Tiffany Alston voted against the bill in the House of Delegates’ Judiciary Committee.

As goes the country on religion, so goes Maryland. Despite liberal views on some matters, Protestants, particularly black Protestants, are in some cases more reliable supporters of Catholic doctrine than Catholics.

While the Church in Maryland lobbied arduously against the bill, and announced its extreme disappointment when it passed the Senate, no one in the Church is discussing whether any of these Catholics can present themselves for Holy Communion at Mass.

Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, has repeatedly affirmed that such politicians must be denied Holy Communion, which means bishops and priests who refuse to do are in very hot water. Spiritually speaking, indeed, they’re in boiling oil. In his remarks to the World Prayer Congress For Life in Rome in last year, Burke explained Church teaching:

We find self-professed Catholics, for example, who sustain and support the right of a woman to procure the death of the infant in her womb, or the right of two persons of the same sex to the recognition which the State gives to a man and a woman who have entered into marriage. It is not possible to be a practicing Catholic and to conduct oneself publicly in this manner. …

To ignore the fact that Catholics in public life, for example, who persistently violate the moral law regarding the inviolability of innocent human life or the integrity of the marital union, lead many into confusion or even error regarding the most fundamental teachings of the moral law, in fact, contributes to the confusion and error, redounding to the gravest harm to our brothers and sisters, and, therefore, to the whole nation. The perennial discipline of the Church, for that reason among other reasons, has prohibited the giving of Holy Communion and the granting of a Church funeral to those who persist, after admonition, in the grave violation of the moral law.

Burke is unafraid to defend the Faith. “I would have to admonish him not to present himself for Communion,” he said of presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in 2004. In 2009, he flung down the gauntlet in front of pro-abortion Kathleen Sebelius, former governor of Kansas and Secretary of Health and Human Services: “No Catholic who publicly and obstinately remains in serious sin can receive Holy Communion. … Whether Governor Sebelius is in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, or in any other diocese, she should not present herself for Holy Communion because, after pastoral admonition, she obstinately persists in serious sin.”

The question, again, is what this means for the priests and bishops who are not, as O’Malley would put it, “in sync” with Burke. Is O’Malley receiving when he goes to Mass? What about the others? And if the priests are serving these politicians Holy Communion, why hasn’t Archbishop Edwin O’Brien stopped them? Perhaps they are afraid to use Holy Eucharist as a “political weapon,” as the Catholic leftists say.

After the bill passed Maryland’s Senate, Mary Ellen Russell, chief of the Maryland Catholic Conference, said “it’s always troubling when someone in such a public position openly disagrees with the church.” She told the Post that the legislation was “a critically important issue for the church.” Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., Archbishop O’Brien and Bishop Francis Malooly of Delaware published a statement after the vote. But it said nothing about any spiritual penalties for Catholic politicians who supported the bill.

But perhaps the more salient point is this: Just as Catholics are responsible for legal abortion in Maryland and across this country, they can now take credit for attacking the sacrament of marriage by conscripting the law to served anti-Christian leftism and organized sodomy.

When Maryland solemnizes homosexual “marriage,” Catholics can take the blame.

R. Cort Kirkwood is a contributor to The Remnant. His last article discussed the near legalization of infanticide in Texas.