Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a federal judicial nominee:
Michael Bogren is a nominee for the U.S. District Court for western Michigan. During Senate judiciary committee hearings yesterday, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley called out the nominee on his unconscionable attempt to equate Catholic teaching against same-sex marriage with the Ku Klux Klan’s opposition to interracial marriage.
Bogren made the comparison in a 2017 legal brief. He was defending the city of East Lansing’s decision to bar Catholic family farm owners from the city’s farmers’ market because they would not rent their farm property out for same-sex weddings.
As Bogren tried to hedge under Hawley’s questioning, the Senator finally asked him point blank: “So you think these things are equivalent? You think that the Catholic family’s pointing to the teachings of their church is equivalent to a KKK member invoking Christianity?”
“From a legal perspective,” Bogren answered, “there’s no distinction.”
Bogren needs to retract that statement immediately.
Biblical teaching is clear that marriage is exclusively the union of one woman and one man. Anyone is free to disagree with that teaching. But to equate it with the racist ideology of the Ku Klux Klan is reprehensible.
Moreover, as Bogren should know—if he doesn’t, he should educate himself about the Klan before invoking them in a legal brief—the KKK’s history is one not only of racist hatred, but of virulent anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic hatred as well. This makes it doubly offensive for Bogren to link a faithful Catholic family to the bigotry of the Klan.
He owes all Catholics an apology.
