Top clerics join to support amendment

Escalating the campaign against the legalization of same-sex marriage, many of the most prominent religious figures in Massachusetts issued statements this weekend calling on the Legislature to preserve marriage as a heterosexual institution.

Three groups representing African-American clergy -- the Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, the Boston Ten Point Coalition, and the Cambridge Black Pastors Conference -- jointly called for the Legislature to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Separately a multifaith coalition, featuring not only Catholic leaders but also leading evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims, declared their opposition to gay marriage. Signatories to the statement included the Rev. William P. Leahy, president of Boston College; the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III of the Azusa Christian Community; the Rev. David M. Midwood, the president of Vision New England, an umbrella organization of 2,000 evangelical Protestant churches; and Metropolitan Methodios, the Greek Orthodox hierarch of New England.

"It's important for people to understand the diversity and the multitude of groups that are concerned about this," said the Rev. Ray A. Hammond, pastor of Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, who signed the statement.

According to leaders who helped pull together the two statements, the documents are intended to make it clear that there is substantial local opposition to gay marriage, even from groups that are not comfortable with some of the more conservative out-of-state organizations, such as Focus on the Family, that have joined the battle on Beacon Hill. "I didn't want us to be viewed as a right-wing group," said the Rev. Wesley A. Roberts, the president of the Black Ministerial Alliance and pastor of Peoples Baptist Church. "I don't see this as a civil rights issue, because to equate what is happening now to the civil rights struggle which blacks had to go through would be to belittle what we had gone through as a people."

The black clergy statement reads, in part: "We acknowledge the pain and suffering of the men and women in the gay and lesbian community who are in long-term relationships. However, given the most recent opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court eliminating the possibility of civil Unions, we support the call for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman."

Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, helped pull together the multi-faith coalition. The Islamic Council of New England, which represents mosques throughout the region, signed on, as did two prominent Orthodox Jews, Grand Rabbi Y. A. Korff, who is the publisher of the Jewish Advocate, and Rabbi Gershon C. Gewirtz, who leads one of the area's largest Orthodox synagogues, Young Israel of Brookline.

"Each of the traditions we represent has long upheld the institution of marriage as a unique bond between a man and a woman," the multifaith statement said.

O'Malley yesterday fielded questions from a crowd of 1,300 Catholic teenagers who gathered at Merrimack College in North Andover, and a young woman from Dorchester asked the archbishop how to show compassion to people concerned about gay marriage and abortion. O'Malley responded that "God's law, that is written on our hearts, is what will truly make us free and noble and good as a people."

O'Malley will headline a rally at the State House today in opposition to gay marriage; in response, the Religious Coalition for Freedom to Marry, which includes many mainline Protestant and Reform Jewish clergy, will demonstrate on the other side of Boston Common.

"Every denomination or faith community should decide on its own who they will marry or who they won't marry, but because civil rights of individuals are involved, civil marriage should be open to everyone," said Episcopal Bishop M. Thomas Shaw.

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com. Globe correspondent Peter DeMarco contributed to this report. The full texts of both statements are at www.boston.com.