As the District of Columbia City Council and Mayor are expected to pass a law affording gay and lesbian couples equal access to civil marriage, the Catholic Church has made its position against the new law and has insisted that it could suspend social services.

In a surprisingly bold and seemingly unbiblical move, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is threatening to discontinue its social support for nearly 70,000 people — including a third of Washington’s homeless — because of its opposition to a proposed same-sex marriage bill.

Under the proposed bill, according to a story by Post reporters Tim Craig and Michelle Boorstein, religious organizations would not be required to perform same-sex weddings, “but they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.”

Apparently, the archdiocese is concerned that it could be forced, for example, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, open adoptions to same-sex couples, or rent a church hall to gay and lesbian groups. “If the city requires this, we can’t do it,” Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem.”

And withdrawing support for the poor and the hungry isn’t a problem?

It gets complicated anytime church and state work together to provide services for people, especially when a mix of public and private funds and facilities is involved. In this case, for example, the church manages a number of city-owned homeless shelters.

The use of public funds and facilities should be governed by secular laws and regulations, including anti-discrimination laws. But churches and other non-profit religious organizations are exempt from many such laws, because of church-state separation.

Read more in the Washington Post.