The Department of Health and Human services recently included contraception in a list of preventive care under the Affordable Care Act. Because of this decision, women will have their birth control covered by their insurance without co-payments. #

The recent poll finds that “two-thirds of Americans (66%) say they support the recent decision by the Department of Health and Human Services to require health insurance plans to pay for the full cost of birth control and other preventive services for women under the new law, and 24 percent of the public oppose the decision.” #

The Catholic Church has been the most outspoken opponent of the decision. Catholic hospitals, Catholic Bishops and Catholic medical providers have expressed their disapproval. Catholic groups claim that the federal agency’s provision allowing religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraception services is “too limited.” #

The Roman Catholic Bishops of New Mexico support the current driver’s license law allowing foreign nationals to obtain a driver’s license with New Mexico residency, and oppose Gov. Susana Martinez’ push to change the law.

From their op-ed:

We support extending driver’s license privileges only to residents of the state. We are in favor of allowing individuals without Social Security numbers to obtain licenses provided that they present other acceptable forms of identification, such as a valid passport, consular identification card, or other recognized government-issued documents, currently required by present law. The present law, when enforced, addresses the issue of fraudulent documents. We have in the past called for a compromise that can strengthen the law and yet issue driver s licenses. We continue to call on the Legislature and the governor to work diligently on a compromise. We believe that this is in the interest of all New Mexicans, and our rationale for this position is as follows:

Licenses for all drivers make our highways safer, since unlicensed drivers have not been tested and, therefore, present a potential danger to everyone using our roads. In addition, unlicensed drivers tend to raise everyone s insurance rates since the former cannot obtain auto insurance.

Licensed drivers make our communities safer because they are more easily identified and tracked. If a law enforcement officer stops an unlicensed driver, that individual might easily give a false name. Such names would not be found in the state’s database, thus undermining law enforcement s efforts to determine whether there are outstanding warrants or other matters related to the person in question.

Repeal of the current driver’s license law would detract from limited state resources at a time of economic crisis. We want our law enforcement and court resources focused on the apprehension of dangerous criminals, rather than on the detention of normally hard-working immigrants.

And, finally, without legal access to driver’s licenses, immigrant workers would not be able to travel to their places of employment, undermining the economic stability of their families as well as the many New Mexico businesses, farms, and ranches that depend on their labor.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Catholics make up about 26 percent of New Mexico’s population. Religious leaders in Alabama have criticized the state’s tough immigration law that makes it a crime to knowingly transport, rent property or harbor illegal immigrants, saying that it criminalizes parts of their Christian ministry.

People protest extending marriage rights to gay couples in Washington, D.C. (Flickr/Fibonnaci Blue)

The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal society founded in New Haven in 1881, does a lot of good work. In a report detailing its charitable giving during 2009, the organization noted that while the “Knights and their families are hardly immune to the economic downturn,” they had once again furthered their proud 128-year tradition of service — a tradition including “helping the widows and orphans of the late 19th century” and “providing coats to poor, cold children.”

Add to that list a donation of a whopping $1.4 million in 2009 to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting same-sex marriage through the ballot initiative system in California, Maine and other states. While NOM hasn’t yet made public its 2009 fundraising numbers, the amount of charitable contributions it received in 2008 totaled approximately $2.9 million.

The NOM donation eclipses what the Knights’ Supreme Council spent on some of its own charitable programs — such as its new effort supporting food banks or its total spending on education initiatives — in the same year, much to the outrage of some observers, including Catholic groups.

“It was a fairly simple, straightforward decision,” says Patrick Korten, vice president for communications for the Knights. “We are pro-family, and believe strongly in the defense of marriage. NOM is the single most important group engaged in defending marriage.”

Less straightforward is the fact that NOM has adopted a policy of refusing to disclose its donors to state election boards, and has sued in the courts rather than complying with existing law — thereby prompting much speculation as to the organization’s sources of funding. (NOM did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) The Knights of Columbus, however, freely disclosed its donation in its August 3 report. The amount was enough to have funded most of NOM’s successful $1.9 million effort to repeal Maine’s same sex marriage law in 2009.

Gay-rights activists have long speculated that the Mormon Church was the primary benefactor behind NOM. But the Knights of Columbus disclosure shows the Catholic group played a pivotal role in funding NOM’s efforts to deny marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples.

Since its founding in 2007 and after its banner moment in 2008 — the passage of Proposition 8 in California, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman — NOM has fought vigorously against requests from various states to disclose its donor rolls. After some donors to NOM’s Prop 8 campaign received nasty emails from political opponents, the group sued the state of California, comparing itself to the NAACP in the 1950s South. It argued that the state’s disclosure laws had prompted harassment of Prop 8 donors and thereby curbed their constitutional right to free speech.

The case in California is still awaiting a trial date next year, but in the intervening months gay rights activists have openly speculated that NOM was used in the state as a front group for the Mormon Church. The allegation, put forth most prominently by activist Fred Karger, has been vehemently denied by NOM.

Karger, however, did manage to prove through public records that Mormon families contributed a large amount of the $40 million raised for the California ProtectMarriage.com campaign, and that the LDS Church, despite making extensive non-monetary contributions to the cause, had failed to report anywhere near the full amount of its efforts to the state of California. At Karger’s insistence, the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) investigated the case and found the Mormon Church guilty of 13 counts of late reporting, fining them more than $5,000.

Negative press prompted NOM to dive further underground. In fundraising endeavors following Prop 8, the group’s president Brian Brown encouraged supporters of efforts to ban gay marriage to donate to NOM as a means of keeping their names undisclosed. The group would act as a middle man of sorts, raising funds from individuals and turning them over to state-based campaigns in lump sums, all the while pledging to keep its donor names a secret.

“And unlike in California, every dollar you give to NOM’s Northeast Action Plan today is private, with no risk of harassment from gay marriage protesters,” Brown wrote in one fundraising appeal. “Donations to NOM are not tax-deductible and they are NOT public information, either,” another one read.

As promised, NOM ran political campaigns in Maine and Iowa in 2009 without disclosing its donors, promptly suing the state of Maine after it opened an ethics investigation against the group and challenging the state’s campaign finance laws as unconstitutional. (That case, too, is awaiting a final verdict.)

NOM continues to spend millions on its legal challenges in Maine, its deep pockets apparently dictating a strategy to challenge and delay disclosing its donors’ names in the courts as long as possible. But the Knights of Columbus’s role in funding NOM — as well as more overt forms of support for Maine’s Amendment 1 initiative from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine – are prompting Catholics opposed to the Church’s involvement in marriage equality issues to organize and speak out.

“You’ve got this really interesting funnel of tax-free money coming from the Dioceses and the Council of Bishops and the Knights of Columbus directly to these campaigns,” notes Phil Attey, executive director of the newly launched organization, Catholics for Equality. “Why are groups like NOM hiding where they’re getting their money? If it turns out to be a front group for the conservative side of the church, Catholics have the right to know because the majority of American Catholics, and we can show you heaps of polls, don’t support that [kind of spending].”

Knights’ spokesman Patrick Korten sees NOM’s noncompliance with disclosure laws in a different light. “The fact of the matter is that those who favor same sex marriage are working hard to intimidate individuals and groups that support our cause, but [the Knights] are big enough that intimidation doesn’t work on us.”

In addition to the opacity of NOM’s funding, some Catholic activists have also taken offense to the fact that, in an economic downturn, the Knights of Columbus Supreme Council’s funding for anti-gay marriage causes has outstripped the amount of funds it supplied for several deserving charitable programs it highlights in its 2010 report.

“As the recession has continued to make it difficult for people who have become unemployed or underemployed, or otherwise get by on lower incomes, the Knights of Columbus has stepped in to help,” notes the Knights’ 2010 report. It highlights a $1 million fund set up by the Supreme Council to supplement the efforts of local councils to support food banks through its new “Food For Families” program, and it touts its Coats for Kids program, which distributed coats to needy children.

But the Supreme Council’s spending on the two programs together still represents less than the $1.4 million it donated to NOM’s anti-gay marriage efforts in 2009. And the Council also donated an additional half million to NOM and $1.15 million to the California ProtectMarriage.com campaign the year prior. The Supreme Council’s total spending on community projects in 2009 (which include soup kitchens, homeless shelters, well drilling projects, and other forms of relief worldwide) totals approximately $3.5 million — an amount that exceeds its giving to anti-gay marriage proposition campaigns, but not by much. The Council’s spending on educational programs in 2009 totaled barely more than $1 million.

Korten nonetheless contends that the Supreme Council’s donations do not paint a full picture of the Knights of Columbus’ annual giving, calling its donations to organizations like NOM “a very small percentage” of the group’s charitable donations. “The vast majority of our charitable work is raised by local councils and that’s always been the case,” he adds.

But other Catholic activists predict that such spending on conservative causes will provoke a backlash among the faithful. “Do you think someone in New Mexico thought their donation was going to this effort in Maine, as opposed to aiding the sick and feeding the hungry?” asks George Burns, an attorney in Maine who fought NOM’s campaign to pass Amendment 1.

“If Catholics find out that while their parishes are closing, and charity work is being underfunded, that our church hierarchy is playing political games with their money, we believe that they’ll be as concerned as we are,” argues Attey.

The Knights, meanwhile, have come a long way from a lone fraternal council in New Haven to governing over 13,000 councils and 1.8 million members worldwide. “Their heritage was as an insurance company because Catholics were discriminated against and couldn’t get insurance,” observes Rev. Dr. Joseph Palacios, founding board member of Catholics for Equality. These days, however, they’re better known for fighting against the marriage rights of gays and lesbian citizens.

Vermont and its teachers union agreed that teachers would work longer, and contribute more toward their pensions, in return for greater pension benefits once they retire. The move is expected to save Vermont money at a time that it is financially strapped.

Meanwhile in Kansas, hiring a prostitute could land you on a sex offender registry under legislation working its way through the Kansas Legislature, according to the Kansas City Star. The legislation would have people convicted of hiring a prostitute put on a sex offender registry for 10 years, the paper reports. The bill has passed the House, and still must clear the Senate.

Starbucks finds itself in the hot seat over the right of gun owners to openly carry firearms into the chain’s coffeehouses, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The coffee chain is in the middle of a controversy in California after gun owners openly carrying firearms began meeting at its stores.

The Catholic Church, and the Pope, are in the spotlight again over an decades-old sex abuse case. The church, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his role as the Vatican’s chief enforcer of canon law prior to his becoming Pope,  failed to act in the case of a Wisconsin priest who was said to have molested hundreds of deaf children over decades of work, the New York Times reports.

Historian Ira Berlin tells us that heavy migration of people from Africa and the Caribbean over the last 30 years is stretching what it means to be African American. Berlin takes on that subject in the Smithsonian Magazine.

During his final year in office, Gov. Bill Richardson will try again to get the New Mexico Legislature to pass a bill establishing domestic partnerships, an aide confirmed Tuesday.

In this year’s session, the domestic partnership bill failed by eight votes.

As Terrell notes, the Catholic Church was a big reason for the “lopsided” failure of domestic partnership in the Senate. But the lobbyist for the Catholic Church told Terrell the church doesn’t want the legislation to be on the agenda for the 30-day session, but wait for the 2011 60-day session.

Of course, by then there will be a new governor, one who may not be as supportive of domestic partnership as Richardson.

Those who oppose domestic partnership say it would open the state to a lawsuit which could lead to same-sex marriage. Proponents say it is a basic right for same-sex couples to share the same rights as heterosexual couples.

The most contentious issue in the New Mexico Legislature session that just ended was, of course, the establishment of domestic partnerships. Opponents charged that the bill was simply a foot in the door to legalizing gay marriage and breathed a sigh of relief when the Senate voted 17-25 against the measure, a significantly larger margin of defeat than many expected.

Supporters of the legislation vowed they would be back to try again next year, and many blamed the defeat on lobbying by the New Mexico Catholic Church.

The vote took place six weeks ago, and so is old news, but the debate over the Catholic influence continues to rage and remains relevant.

I’ve read numerous letters to the editor from readers filled with outrage that the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops had come out against the measure and that their opposition had swayed some Senate Democrats who had been supporters of a domestic partnership law. This, many alleged, was a violation of the separation of church and state.

Only two days ago, The Santa Fe New Mexican ran a “My View” commentary by Michael J. Sheehan, archbishop of Santa Fe, defending the church’s role in the debate:

The Church believes it has an obligation to share its rich 2,000-year tradition of social teaching with others, and the Constitution protects our right to do so. It is not a violation of the separation of church and state to do so! We do not state support for or speak against any political party or politician running for office.

Yeah, right, say angry Democrats: When you preach against abortion and gay marriage, you’re essentially supporting the Republican platform. In its self-righteous indignation, the party chooses not to make an issue of the church’s outspoken opposition to the death penalty, since in that instance the church is with the Democrats.

Whether the church is on the side of Democrats or Republicans is, however, beside the point. The issue isn’t ideology; it’s law: Is the church or is it not violating the constitutional separation of church and state?

Democrats say “yes” when they’re talking about abortion and homosexuality and keep their mouths shut when the issue is capital punishment. Republicans generally say “no” regardless of the issue, though some libertarian-leaning Republicans disagree.

Not long ago, I got into a debate with a fellow Republican who was bemoaning the damage all those religious-right types were doing to our party. He insisted that arguments based on religious beliefs had no place in political discourse, and that religious leaders interfering in the political process, as the New Mexican bishops had done, violated the separation of church and state.

I begged to differ, pointing out that the only mention of religion in the Constitution is in the First Amendment, which reads,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

This means only that Congress may not set up an established church of the United States the way Britain has an established Church of England, supported by tax revenues and with special privileges accruing to members of the established church. My fellow Republican replied that that isn’t all it means. So what does it mean? I pressed. He just repeated that it meant more than that but did not provide any justification for why he thought so.

I came home and double-checked the Constitution just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, but no, that indeed is all it says.

It seems pretty clear to me that a Catholic bishop expressing his opinion on a piece of legislation does not constitute the establishment of an official Church of the U.S.A., nor does it prevent any other citizen from freely exercising his right to his own religious beliefs. The fact is, Catholic bishops are entitled to express their opinions just like plumbers and architects and newspaper reporters and waiters and housewives and congressmen and prostitutes.

I only quoted the beginning of the First Amendment above. The rest of it reads:

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Arguing that a Catholic bishop may not express his opinion on a piece of legislation is essentially depriving the bishop of his freedom of speech.

You can argue all day that he has more authority before his congregation than an ordinary citizen and that the weight of the church’s authority standing behind his pronouncements gives them some sort of coercive force over Catholic legislators and citizens, but that argument simply won’t hold water. When Archbishop Sheehan expresses his opinion against abortion or gay marriage or the death penalty, Catholics are free to agree (as I do on the first two issues and most Democrats do on the third) or disagree (as most Democrats do on the first two issues and I do on the third).

A lot of people allow their opinions to be swayed by what celebrities say — though for the life of me I’ll never understand why — so theoretically if we’re going to say Catholic bishops can’t opine, maybe we ought to say that Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon can’t either.

The fact is, Archbishop Sheehan has the same right to freedom of political speech as you and I do. His ordination did not strip him of the rights the Constitution guarantees him.

When the archbishop opines politically, he is exercising his freedom of speech; he is not establishing a taxpayer-funded church.

Ten Democrats joined all Senate Republicans to defeat the bill. Sen. Pete Campos, D-Las Vegas, cited an onslaught of e-mails and phone calls in the final days. The influence of the religious right — including the Catholic Church here in New Mexico — may have been what spurred that onslaught, but the impact was felt overwhelmingly by rural Democrats:

Democrats Opposed to SB 12
1. Bernadette Sanchez (D-Albuquerque)
2. John Pinto (D-Tohatchiti)
3. John Arthur Smith (D-Deming)
4. Pete Campos (D-Las Vegas)
5. Richard Martinez (D-Española)
6. Linda Lovejoy (D-Crownpoint)
7. George Munoz (D-Gallup)
8. David Ulibarri (D-Grants)
9. Tim Jennings (D-Roswell)
10. Carlos Cisneros (D-Questa)

Democrats In favor of SB 12
1. Tim Eichenberg (D-Albuquerque)
2. Dede Feldman (D-Albuquerque)
3. Eric Griego (D-Albuquerque)
4. Timothy Keller (D-Albuquerque)
5. Cisco McSorley (D-Albuquerque)
6. Gerald Ortiz y Pino (D-Albuquerque)
7. Linda Lopez (D-Albuquerque
8. John Sapien (D-Corrales)
9. Michael Sanchez (D-Belen)
10. Mary Kay Papen (D-Las Cruces)
11. Nancy Rodriguez (D-Santa Fe)
12. Peter With (D-Santa Fe)
13. Mary Jane Garcia (D-Las Cruces)
14. Phil Griego (D-San Jose)
15. Howie Morales (D-Silver City)
16. Cynthia Nava (D-Las Cruces)
17. Steve Fischmann (D-Las Cruces)

The Senate debates the domestic partnership legislation Thursday.

SANTA FE — The two crowds couldn’t have been more different. One was joyous, the other tearful.

Moments before, the New Mexico Senate voted 25-17 to oppose conferring many of the same rights enjoyed by married couples to same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples in a committed relationship.

Gathered in a lobby on the west side of the Capitol, victorious opponents stood in a circle. Hands clasped with smiles plastered on their faces and their eyes closed, they listened as someone led a prayer in thanks for the bill’s defeat.

“Remember God loves them as much as He loves us,” Daniel Ruiz, an opponent, shouted to others as the impromptu prayer broke up. Ruiz explained later that he was referring to gays and lesbians.

On the other side of the Roundhouse a larger crowd, with many of those gays and lesbians Ruiz had referred to, clustered around a tearful Marybeth Lennox. Some individuals wiped away tears. Others wore the hangdog look of the defeated. Still others looked shell-shocked.

“Where were our supporters?” Lennox, a field organizer with the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization, shouted. “You’ve got to push, make phone calls.”

Lennox sounded frustrated, perhaps at the legislation’s defeat or possibly at the thumping supporters had just taken.

For a vote that had been touted as being so close no one knew how the Senate was going to go — in support of domestic partnerships, or against — the eight-vote margin on the Senate floor against domestic partnerships had turned out to be the biggest surprise Thursday.

Two years ago, the legislation had failed by one vote in committee. Last year, it was a two-vote margin in a committee.

With the House and Senate adding several progressive lawmakers to their ranks this year, supporters had viewed this year as the best shot yet for New Mexico to pass domestic partnership legislation, and to make a signal statement in the national debate over gay rights.

With the exception of Hawaii, all the states that recognize same sex marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships are on the East Coast or West Coast (pdf).

But advocates had learned not to fall to the temptation of overconfidence. No one expected passage of the legislation to be easy.

What supporters ran into this year was a buzzsaw of opposition, and a confluence of factors that worked against the bill’s passage.

Several lawmakers interviewed Thursday spoke of a push by both sides that was unrivaled by campaigns in previous years.

“I received 2,500 e-mails in two days,” said Sen. Pete Campos, D-Las Vegas, who was one of 10 Democrats to side with 15 Republicans to kill the bill Thursday. Last year, Campos publicly announced that he supported domestic partnerships.

Roughly, 90 percent of the e-mails were from people opposed, he said. At the same time, his office got 750 calls over the same period. There, the split was closer, with opponents composing about 60 percent of the calls.

Meanwhile, New Mexico’s Catholic Church jumped into the debate over domestic partnerships this year after two years of staying largely out of the issue.

“There’s no question that they had a big influence,” said former Lt. Gov. Walter Bradley, an opponent who lobbied lawmakers on the issue for the Christian Life Committee of the state’s Southern Baptist Convention.

A spokesman for the Catholic Church, as well as Campos, explained their change in position by pointing to what had happened in other states over the past year.

The top courts in Connecticut and California during 2008 ruled that domestic partnerships – or civil unions in the case of Connecticut – were inherently legally unfair and were not the same as marriage. Citing equal protection under the law, each state’s Supreme Court struck down the laws creating domestic partnerships. The courts also found a “fundamental right to marry” and ruled that marriage was available to gay and lesbian couples.

“I’ve been watching this issue over the past year,” Campos said of the court rulings.

The experiences of California and Connecticut figured prominently in opponents’ arguments throughout this year’s debate, including Thursday’s discussion on the Senate floor.

“It makes New Mexico ripe for a court challenge,” Sen. William Payne, R-Albuquerque, said of the legislation. “This is a very cleverly crafted bill. It is designed to set up a court challenge.”

But the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Cisco McSorley, D-Albuquerque, disputed that contention, saying the bill not only included language saying that it wasn’t marriage, but to not pass it could result in New Mexico getting same-sex marriage.

“If we pass this, the Supreme Court must consider what we have done,” he said. “The Supreme Court will have to look at everything we have done in this bill. They must conclude that we spoke and that we spoke loudly and clearly.”

Still, to allay opponents’ fears, McSorley ran a substitute bill Thursday that removed all language referring to domestic partnerships granting the same protections to its recipients as state law does to spouses. Replacing it was a phrase that said domestic partnerships were granted rights “as contemplated by Section 40-1-1 NMSA 1978″ — the provision in state law that establishes marriage as a civil contract.

The substitute was offered as a possible peace offering to opponents meant to garner a few more votes. Ultimately the strategy didn’t work.

Linda Siegle, a key lobbyist for the domestic partnerships legislation, said what killed the legislation was not what happened in other states or the lack of the substitute’s efficacy, but how opponents framed the issue.

“I think religious organizations convinced people that this was marriage, when it was not even close to marriage,” Siegle said.

It is unclear whether the legislation will be brought up again this year.

“The margin makes it a little unlikely,” said Senate Minority Whip Stuart Ingle, R-Portales, who voted against the legislation.

Santa Fe's Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi

SANTA FE — For two years, the Roman Catholic Church remained silent on domestic partnerships in New Mexico.

That changed this year.

In a high-profile turnaround, the state’s largest religious institution has weighed in against a bill that would confer many of the rights married couples enjoy to both same-sex and unmarried opposite-sex couples.

An Archdiocese of Santa Fe spokesman inveighed against the bill at this year’s primary legislative hearing on the bill as Archbishop Michael Sheehan sat a few feet away, making for a very visible presence. Meanwhile, Catholic parishioners have joined the chorus of opponents in greater numbers than in the past, making telephone calls to state lawmakers to voice their opposition to the legislation.

Opponents in previous years were composed mainly of nondenominational and Baptist church members.

Some say the Catholic Church’s decision to get off the sidelines has had a dramatic effect on an already tense debate that at its heart features a clash of two big ideas — equal rights vs. traditional values.

“It’s changed the dynamic,” said Rep. Mimi Stewart, D-Albuquerque, who is sponsoring the legislation in the House of Representatives.

The legislation’s highest-profile supporter, Gov. Bill Richardson, noted the change in a year that has looked to be the most promising for the bill’s fortunes. Several progressive lawmakers won seats to the state House and Senate, essentially bolstering the ranks of the bill’s supporters.

“It’s been enormous,” Richardson said of the Catholic Church’s influence. “They are a very powerful force. Hopefully we will prevail, very narrowly. It’s a very divisive issue.”

Domestic partnership opponents, meanwhile, are welcoming the Catholic Church’s voice in a state where a large segment of the population identifies itself as Catholic.

“In the past we haven’t had the unity that we have right now from all the different denominations and the Catholics,” said Rep. Nora Espinoza, R-Roswell. This year “we stand together under one common ground — family values.”

The Catholic Church’s influence will be tested as early as Monday, when the Senate is expected to vote on the legislation. The vote count is so close that advocates and opponents are unsure whose side will prevail.

The legislation has died in the Senate the past two years. The House barely passed it last year on a 33-31 vote.

Deacon Steve Rangel, who speaks for the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops on the issue, could not be reached for comment. But earlier this year Rangel told state lawmakers that the church had waded into the debate this year because court decisions in other states displayed how domestic partnerships can ultimately lead to same-sex marriage.

One prominent example is Connecticut, which joined Massachusetts as the only other state to recognize same-sex marriage in October.

(California briefly recognized same-sex marriage after the state’s Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban on it. California voters, however, approved a proposition in November that banned same-sex marriages.)

The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the state’s civil unions law, passed in 2005, was discriminatory and set up an unequal treatment under the law.

Domestic partnerships, like civil unions, would lead to same-sex marriage because someone could challenge legally recognized domestic partnerships as an unequal and pale version of marriage, opponents say.

Supporters of the legislation respond that passing domestic partnerships would not lead to marriage, partly because the bill itself has language that says domestic partnerships should not be mistaken as civil marriage.

The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, says that while California and Connecticut did allow marriage after starting with domestic partnerships, the court rulings were based on each state’s constitution, and not on the domestic partnership law.

Seven of the nine states that have domestic partnerships — or civil unions — have not allowed gay couples to marry, the ACLU points out. In two of those states — Washington and New Jersey — courts specifically decided their constitutions did not require marriage.

It is difficult to assess the actual influence of the Catholic Church’s stance on the domestic partnerships debate in the Legislature.

There is no debate that New Mexico boasts a large Catholic population. But discerning how large is difficult. The usual number used for those who identify as Catholic but aren’t necessarily on the church rolls is 40 percent of the population, said Richard Wood, who teaches religious studies at University of New Mexico.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops estimates that roughly a quarter of New Mexico’s population — or 498,334 — are on church rolls, while the Association of Religion Data Archives estimates around 670,000 Catholics in New Mexico.

Any of those numbers would make Catholics by far the largest religious group in the state.

But as with all religious groups, Catholics don’t necessarily speak with one voice.

“I’m Roman Catholic,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman, Rep. Al Park, D-Albuquerque, who is a supporter of domestic partnerships.

“The Constitution of the U.S. provides equal protection under the law for all citizens. And that is really important,” Park said. “We should be treated the same regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, creed, all of those things.”

But Espinoza, the Roswell lawmaker opposed to domestic partnerships, said that the Catholic Church’s joining the debate this year signals a new unified front against such legislation.

“I think we will see some changes,” Espinoza said. “I really believe that the community that believes very strongly out there in family values is going to become more active in the process.”