California Episcopal Church talks about abandoning weddings in wake of same-sex ruling

July 1, 2008
By JENNIFER GARZA
SACRAMENTO BEE/Scripps Howard News Service

The controversy over same-sex marriage -- along with a growing sense that many couples who marry in churches never return -- has prompted faith leaders to say it's time to reconsider how couples tie the knot.

After the California Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California began encouraging all couples to marry outside the church.

"I urge you to encourage all couples, regardless of orientation, to follow the pattern of first being married in a secular service, and then being blessed in the Episcopal Church," Bishop Marc Handley Andrus wrote his clergy June 9. the rest