San Francisco archbishop defends marriage-amendment supporters

December 04, 2008

In a column that appears in tomorrow’s edition of the San Francisco archdiocesan newspaper, Archbishop George Niederauer defends supporters of Proposition 8 against the charge that “hatred, prejudice and bigotry against gays, along with a determination to discriminate against them and deny them their civil rights” motivated their support for the amendment that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

“The churches that worked in favor of Proposition 8,” the archbishop writes, “did so because of their belief that the traditional understanding and definition of marriage is in need of defense and support, and not in need of being re-designed or re-configured … Members of churches who supported Proposition 8 sincerely believe that defining marriage as only between a man and a woman is one such issue. They see marriage and the family as the basic building blocks of human society, existing before government and not created by it. Marriage is for us the ideal relationship between a man and woman, in which, through their unique sexual complementarity, the spouses offer themselves to God as co-creators of new human persons, a father and mother giving them life and enabling them to thrive in the family setting.”

Believers, the archbishop emphasizes, have the right to take part in public life: “Indeed, to insist that citizens be silent about their religious beliefs when they are participating in the public square is to go against the constant American political tradition. Such a gag order would have silenced many abolitionists in the nineteenth century and many civil rights advocates in the twentieth. Quite a number of important political issues regularly touch upon the ethical, moral, and religious convictions of citizens: immigration policy, the death penalty, torture of prisoners, abortion, euthanasia, and the right to health care are some such issues.”

“Tolerance, respect, and trust,” Archbishop Niederauer adds, “are always two-way streets, and tolerance respect and trust often do not include agreement, or even approval. We need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable. We need to stop talking as if we are experts on the real motives of people with whom we have never even spoken. We need to stop hurling names like ‘bigot’ and ‘pervert’ at each other. And we need to stop it now.”

 

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Further information:

• Moving forward together” (Catholic San Francisco)