My crisis of faith continues: With a small C, "catholic" refers to a church for all--a universal church. With a big C, it seems more and more to be about exclusion, especially in Ohio where Catholic bishops have given full support to a constitutional ban on gay marriage. (The Ohio provision goes one huge step further: not only would it bar same-sex marriage, it will also prevent committed gay and lesbian couples from receiving any legal benefits of civil union.)

That is, bishops acting in the name of a living God who hung out with society's outcasts--hookers, adulterers, lepers, and thuggish tax collectors--wish to forever engrain intolerance and exclusion into the state's founding documents.

I respect that the church has theological concerns about same-sex unions and homosexuality in general, but is it really Christ-like to use their considerable clout to encourage permanent discrimination against one category of God's children? (That's the moral argument; the legal one, written about here, is that marriage is a legal proceeding in the eyes of the state, a case of regulatory paperwork that has little to do--on a state licensing level--with sacraments.) I'm also curious about the likelihood that some of the Ohio bishops who voted unanimously to endorse the amendment are gay: 10 to 50% of men in the priesthood have a homosexual orientation (in his 1995 book "Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis," A.W. Richard Sipe put the figure at 30%)--rates much higher than those of the larger American society.

The bishops' statement said, "Homosexual persons are to be treated with respect and compassion. Our respect means we condemn all forms of unjust discrimination, harassment or abuse." So perhaps they see this as a form of "just discrimination."