Catholic League president Bill Donohue addresses remarks made today by David Boies, an attorney for those challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California resolution affirming the traditional understanding of marriage. Boies made his comments at the San Francisco trial on January 26; the following is Donohue’s statement:
When African Americans were seeking equal rights, they never sought to upend the most fundamental social institutions in society, namely marriage and the family. Nor did they ever denigrate world religions. Instead, people like Martin Luther King, himself a minister, spoke respectfully of Christianity and other religions. But the situation in San Francisco is different: David Boies, and his colleague Theodore B. Olsen, cannot make their case for homosexual marriage without demonizing religion. They have a special fondness for bashing Catholicism.
Boies didn’t so much as throw a curve today—he served up a wild pitch. By pointing out that Catholicism teaches that homosexual acts are a “serious depravity,” and that the Southern Baptist Convention labels them an “abomination,” he was asking the presiding judge to connect the dots between the identification of sinful acts and the sanctioning of incivility against the sinners.
The argument fails miserably. As the Catholic Church has long noted, there is a huge difference between condemning sinful behavior and condemning those who engage in it. It is even more preposterous to sanction incivility against sinners by the self-righteous.
Plato condemned sodomy. Jefferson thought it should be a felony. Neither was Catholic. And neither they, nor the Catholic Church, ever thought it was okay for gay bashers to act out their hatred. That this even needs to be said doesn’t speak well for where Boies wants to go.
