{"id":10814,"date":"2010-10-25T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-26T02:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=10814"},"modified":"2010-10-25T22:17:03","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T02:17:03","slug":"the-know-nothing-appeals-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2010\/10\/the-know-nothing-appeals-court\/","title":{"rendered":"The Know-Nothing Appeals Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is an update to a story – first a little background.<\/p>\n

Early in 2006, Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a statement clarifying that Church agencies should not place children for adoption with same-sex couples. The statement had particular significance for Levada\u2019s former Archdiocese of San Francisco, whose Catholic Charities agency had been placing children for adoption with same-sex couples.<\/p>\n

In response to Cardinal Levada\u2019s statement, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution denouncing the Vatican\u2019s foreign meddling, demanding Levada retract his \u201chateful,\u201d \u201cinsulting,\u201d \u201cdiscriminatory,\u201d \u201ccallous\u201d\u00a0 and ignorant directive, and urging current San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer and Catholic Charities \u201cto defy all discriminatory directives of Cardinal Levada.\u201d Members of the Board of Supervisors also threatened to remove funding from Catholic Charities\u2019 other programs unless they did defy the Vatican (The City was not funding the adoption program at Catholic Charities).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Always nice to have a city council call your religious beliefs to be hateful. Apparently loving your brother and not wanting them to sin is hateful and calling sin normal is loving.<\/p>\n

We would have a different case on our hands had the defendants called upon Cardinal Levada to recant his views on transubstantiation, or had urged Orthodox Jews to abandon the laws of kashrut, or Mormons their taboo of alcohol. Those matters of religious dogma are not within the secular arena in the way that same-sex marriage and adoption are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jack Smith at the Catholic Key blog replies<\/a> to this nonsense succinctly:<\/p>\n

Translated, your freedom of religion encompasses all the superstitious voodoo you care to indulge in, but you may not have a religious dogma at variance with something the City cares about \u2013 like sex.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Political Correctness is the secular dogma that must be adhered to or you will be banished Now it might sound like no big deal that a silly city council like San Francisco’s would make such a statement, that is almost to be expected. Much worse when the courts turn a blind eye to religious discrimination and bigotry. They of course can not explain why the area of same-sex marriage do not come within the arena of religious thought. Really the opposition to same-sex marriage can be discovered in the natural law and if religion can’t protect marriage the very basis of family life, than really religion becomes only an intellectual hobby with no real-world applications.<\/p>\n

This appeal court is not called the Ninth Circus Court for no reason and it is no surprise how often their actions are overturned. This case certainly calls out to be tried in the Supreme Court as an important First Amendment case. If the government gets a pass on religious bigotry and know-nothingism we will certainly get more bigotry of this kind. If the case does make it to SCOTUS it will certainly become a media circus as once again the fact that five justices on the court are Catholic. I wonder if the pundits will say that they must recuse themselves? If only the anti-Catholic bigots would have to recuse themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is an update to a story – first a little background. Early in 2006, Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10817,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10814\/revisions\/10817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}