Sodom and Gomorrah will not spring forth fully formed along the streets of America should this nation develop legal recognition for gay couples who want the same civil rights as straight couples.

Our churches will not evaporate into the ether.

Marriages between men and women will be affected nary one whit.

Last week’s ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that lesbian and gay couples have a right to marry does not signal the end of civilization as Americans know it. All y’all participating in fear-mongering by crying that the United States is going to hell in a pink boa need to shush a minute.

This is a question of civil rights, and the nation’s democratic foundations of fairness and equal protection are shaken if one sector of society is treated differently from the others.

Separate-but-equal has always been a failure. It was wrong when George Wallace was parading around the South crying, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and it’s wrong now.

The question before America is one of every citizen’s rights to disposition of property, visitation privileges at hospitals, inheritance, making medical decisions for one’s partner in emergencies, bereavement and sick leave rights extended by employers, shared benefits like Social Security and Medicare.

This is “not” about one’s standing in the eyes of God.

This is a temporal question, not a heavenly one.

Today’s wailing about the societal disintegration that will surely follow such a radical legal development has a familiar ring, or it should to students of U.S. history.

Until the mid-19th century, women in this country lost what we today assume are basic civil rights when they said, “I do.” Married women couldn’t own property — although unmarried women could. Wives couldn’t make out wills without the permission of their husbands. They had no legal say about how their children were reared.

This was an extension of 18th-century British common law, in which William Blackstone wrote: “By marriage, the husband and the wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”

And Blackstone’s law appears to be an extension of Old Testament edict that women were members of the covenant people of God only because of their relationship to their father, brother or husband.

Thank goodness the Good Book didn’t stop there.

Hard-fought legal changes gave us our present-day incarnation of “civil marriage” and the rights that go along with that status.

Many people of faith who respect the tenets of a democratic society — equal protection under earthly law — struggle with this issue, but injecting religion into what is an argument about civil rights blurs the question.

Government can’t force churches to recognize gay marriage. That is up to individual denominations and congregations.

Just as some churches to this day forbid divorce among their members — even though civil divorce is very real — churches can decide not to recognize the civil marriage of homosexuals.

It’s the broader rejection of homosexuals as people that concerns this believer. All who have faith in Jesus Christ should be welcomed to baptism, membership and confirmation, mission and pastoral care — the full life of Christian community.

Yet that is not the reality in too many of our churches.

Jesus walked with people who were shunned by the mainstream society of his day. He often broke the religious laws of his time to help others. His life, death and resurrection mean that every person has equal value before God, no matter what the world might say.

Religious legalism is anathema to the Good News. It’s what killed Jesus, and it is what is driving people away from the Christian church instead of to it.

Jill “J.R.” Labbe is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Her e-mail address is jrlabbe@star-telegram.com.