A Boston Globe editorial yesterday criticized Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for endorsing a bill that would allow Catholic Charities to continue providing adoption services without servicing gay couples. In a related development, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom said he will not attend the installation ceremony of former San Francisco Archbishop William Levada as a cardinal because of the Vatican’s opposition to gay adoptions.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:
“In perhaps the most anti-Catholic editorial we’ve seen in years by any major American newspaper, the Boston Globe erupted in a Catholic-bashing furor yesterday that will surely mar its reputation. It wasn’t sufficient for the newspaper to simply criticize Governor Romney for seeking to exempt Catholic Charities from a state law on adoption services, it had to lecture him that he is ‘governor, not a Catholic bishop.’ Worse, after citing John F. Kennedy’s remarks on separation of church and state, the editorial accused Romney, a Mormon, of ‘accepting instructions on public policy from the pope.’ Their lame attempt to spin the issue will fool no one save those Boston Catholics whose anger over the sex abuse scandal has driven them off the deep end. They are so full of rage they can’t even see straight anymore.
“Another city that is cracking up with Catholic-bashing furor is San Francisco. It’s not the Catholics who have cracked up there—it’s those public officials who are so wedded to the radical gay agenda that they no longer know what the common good means. When Pope John Paul II died, Mayor Newsom and the entire Board of Supervisors refused to attend a Mass presided over by Archbishop Levada, and now Newsom has decided not to travel to Rome for Levada’s installation because he thinks the Vatican’s opposition to gay adoption is ‘corrosive and divisive.’ He also blasted the Vatican for its ‘stale and questionable documents,’ as if his trendy and morally bankrupt positions should instruct the Vatican.
“It’s open season on the Catholic Church. The bullies need to be beaten back and branded as the bigots that they are.”
