State putting Church out of the adoption business

While the mainstream media decries the Massachusetts bishops' decision to "get out of the adoption business," B.C. Law School dean John Garvey sees it from a different perspective...that it is the state itself that forced the decision. His opening paragraph exemplifies the easy-to-follow (for me, anyway) logic of his op-ed piece in today's Boston Globe:

TITLE VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids employment discrimination on the basis of gender. It doesn't make an exception for churches. However, courts have interpreted Title VII to exempt churches. This is not surprising. Catholics, Mormons, and certain Orthodox Christians do not ordain women as priests. Orthodox Jews do not ordain women as rabbis. Traditional schools of Islam do not allow women to act as imams. The Constitution would not permit the government to change these church rules even if it wanted to.

Read the whole article here.