A church in North Carolina took an admirable and interesting step recently in the battle for equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. They’re refusing to sign marriage licenses until same-sex couples have equal marriage rights in the state. It’s admirable because it’s bold and sends a clear message, but interesting, as well, because it’s hard to tell what the actual impact will be in the end.

The Green Street United Methodist Church has said that they will no longer perform marriages for heterosexual couples because of marriage inequality. Raw Story reports the following:

In an interview that aired on Monday, Green Street United Methodist Church Senior Pastor Kelly Carpenter told WXII that heterosexual members of his congregation wanted same-sex couples to “share a sense of the love that they have found.”

On Friday, the church posted a statement to its Facebook page explaining that “the church sees injustice in the legal position of state government and the theological position of our denomination.” “North Carolina prohibits same-sex marriage and all the rights and privileges marriage brings,” the statement said. “The Leadership Council has asked that their ministers join others who refuse to sign any State marriage licenses until this right is granted to same-sex couples.”

Other Methodist churches have also stood up for civil rights in the battle for marriage equality, and some have been doing it for quite a while. Trinity United Methodist Church in Texas, for example, has been actively standing up for gay rights since 1992. As it says on their website,

Our congregation voted to become a Reconciling Congregation on October 28, 1992 and joined the Reconciling Congregation Program. The Reconciling movement is the commitment among United Methodists to change the ecclesial discrimination toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians within the United Methodist Church and work toward a church and society that is fully inclusive of people regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.

It remains to be seen how effective this tactic will be in helping to legislate equality for all couples. While it certainly sends a clear message as to the stance of the church on the rights of same-sex couples, it’s not as though conservative or closed-minded people are going to those churches in droves to get married anyway. Either way, evidence shows that progress toward equality is being made on a large-scale. As the public increasingly approves of same-sex marriage, more and more states — and eventually the federal government — will recognize same-sex couples as legally equal to heterosexual couples.