It was only a question of time before civil servants with a Christian ( or Jewish or Islamic) view on marriage were elbowed out, say protestant and SGP member Wouter van den Berg and catholic and Christian Union member Remco van Mulligen in Trouw.

All the signs were there. Last week Groningen city council was the first to announce that civil servants who refuse to officiate at gay weddings will not have their contracts renewed.
When you look at the amount of negative press about the conscientious objectors among civil servants you would be justified in thinking that we are dealing with a pressing problem on a grand scale. But in Groningen, only three out of seventeen civil servants object and in Amsterdam it is two out of five hundred.
The point of view that marriage is a union between a man and a woman is as old as the hills and is still prevalent in most of the world. And as such it deserves respect.
This question is rooted in a much larger problem. Society has become a tougher place in the last decade. Wilders’ stance against Islam and the secularists’ need to ban religion from the public domain have come together.
Progressive and liberal parties learnt the wrong lesson from the rise of Pim Fortuyn. They are showing tolerance only to their own political principles. It used to be common to accept things that weren’t quite according to the norm. A police officer wearing a headscarf was perfectly all right as long as street safety wasn’t compromised. A civil servant was entitled to his opinions as long as it didn’t stand in the way of gay couples getting married. Job Cohen, junior minister at the time, guaranteed this right when same sex marriages were allowed by law in 2002.
To get rid of civil servants who object to gay marriages is no more than gesture politics. ‘Leave your conscience at home’ is what they are told. It is typical of our times. To put it bluntly: secularists can say whatever they like where they like but people with religious principles can’t.
Minority points of view are being attacked by a secular government. How long before every doctor is forced by law to perform euthanasia or an abortion? In 2000 a civil servant’s right to say no to officiating at a same sex wedding was written in stone. And now look.
Let’s reverse the situation. Civil servants are selected so as to be recognisable to a broad segment of the population. Orthodox believers can be assured of finding a civil servant who understands the specific meaning that marriage has for them. This valuable tradition will go by the board.
All this has nothing to do with discrimination against gays. Gays in Groningen can choose from a large number of civil servants who would joyfully join them in matrimony. It has everything to do with putting marriage in a political and ideological context. In that case it would probably be more honest to reduce the civil marriage to a bit of bureaucratic paperwork and be done with it.
This is an unofficial translation.