San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone chairs the United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and
Defense of Marriage. Here are his views on the subject in response to
questions from USA TODAY:
Q: What is the greatest threat posed by allowing gays and lesbians to marry?
A:The
better question is: What is the great good in protecting the public
understanding that to make a marriage you need a husband and a wife?
I
can illustrate my point with a personal example. When I was Bishop of
Oakland, I lived at a residence at the Cathedral, overlooking Lake
Merritt. It's very beautiful. But across the lake, as the streets go
from 1st Avenue to the city limits at 100th Avenue, those 100 blocks
consist entirely of inner city neighborhoods plagued by fatherlessness
and all the suffering it produces: youth violence, poverty, drugs,
crime, gangs, school dropouts, and incredibly high murder rates. Walk
those blocks and you can see with your own eyes: A society that is
careless about getting fathers and mothers together to raise their
children in one loving family is causing enormous heartache.
To
legalize marriage between two people of the same sex would enshrine in
the law the principle that mothers and fathers are interchangeable or
irrelevant, and that marriage is essentially an institution about
adults, not children; marriage would mean nothing more than giving
adults recognition and benefits in their most significant relationship.
How can we do this to our children?
Q: If the Supreme Court opens the floodgates to gay marriage in California (or beyond), what will be the result?
A: If the Supreme Court overturns Prop 8, this will not go down in history as the Loving v. Virginia but as the Roe v. Wade decision of our generation.
No
matter what the Supreme Court rules, this debate is not over. Marriage
is too important and the issues raised by treating same-gender unions
as marriages are too fundamental to just go away. Just as Roe v. Wade
did not end the conversation about abortion, so a ruling that tries to
import same-sex marriage into our Constitution is not going to end the
marriage debate, but intensify it.
We will have a bitterly polarized country divided on the marriage issue for years if not generations to come.
Q: Why is this of such importance to children?
A:
Why has virtually every known civilization across time and history
recognized the need to bring together men and women to make and raise
the next generation together? Clearly something important is at stake,
or human beings of such different cultures, histories and religions
would not come up with the basic idea of marriage as a male-female union
over and over again.
... When we as a culture abandon
that idea and ideal, children suffer, communities suffer, women suffer,
and men are dehumanized by being told they aren't important to the
project of family life.
Modern social science evidence
generally supports the idea that the ideal for a child is a married
mother and father. The scientific study of children raised by two men
or two women is in its infancy ... several recent studies ... are
painting a less sanguine portrait thatsome professional organizations
have yet acknowledged about whether two dads can make up for the absence
of a mom, or vice versa.
We all know heroic single mothers
who do a great job raising their kids (just as there are gay people who
take good care of their children). But the question of the definition
of marriage is not about success or failure in parenting in any
particular case.
The job of single mothers is hard
precisely because we aren't as a society raising boys to believe they
need to become faithful husbands and fathers, men who care for and
protect their children, and the mother of their children, in marriage.
And we aren't raising girls to be the kind of young women with the high
standards and the self-worth to expect and appreciate such men, and not
to settle for less.
Q: How would the allegation that opponents are bigoted lead to their rights being abridged?
A:
Notice the first right being taken away: the right of 7 million
Californians who devoted time and treasure to the democratic process, to
vote for our shared vision of marriage. Taking away people's right to
vote on marriage is not in itself a small thing.
But the
larger picture that's becoming increasingly clear is that this is not
just a debate about what two people do in their private life, it's a
debate about a new public norm: Either you support redefining marriage
to include two people of the same sex or you stand accused by law and
culture of bigotry and discrimination.
If you want to know
what this new public legal and social norm stigmatizing traditional
believers will mean for real people, ask David and Tanya Parker, who
objected to their kindergarten son being taught about same sex marriage
after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized it in that state and
wanted to pull him out of class for that lesson. He was arrested and
handcuffed for trying to protect his son's education, and they were told
they had no right to do so.
Ask the good people of
Ocean Grove Methodist camp in New Jersey that had part of its tax-exempt
status rescinded because they don't allow same-sex civil union
ceremonies on their grounds. Ask Tammy Schulz of Illinois, who adopted
four children (including a sibling group) through Evangelical Child
Family Services — which was shut down because it refuses to place
children with same-sex couples. (The same thing has happened in
Illinois, Boston and Washington, D.C., to Catholic Charities adoption
services). ... Ask the doctor in San Diego County who did not want to
personally create a fatherless child through artificial insemination,
and was punished by the courts.... Ask Amy Rudnicki who testified in
the Colorado Legislature recently that if Catholic Charities is shut out
of the adoption business by new legislation, her family will lose the
child they expected to adopt this year. ... Nobody is better off if
religious adoption agencies are excluded from helping find good homes
for abused and neglected children, but governments are doing this
because the principle of "anti-discrimination" is trumping liberty and
compassion. ...
When people say that opposition to gay
marriage is discriminatory, like opposition to interracial marriage,
they cannot also say their views won't hurt anybody else. They seek to
create and enforce a new moral and legal norm that stigmatizes those who
view marriage as the union of husband and wife. ... It's not kind, and
it doesn't seem to lead to a "live and let live" pluralism.
Q:
You have spoken of gay marriage as a "natural impossibility." But in
terms of procreation, how does it differ from opposite-sex couples who
are elderly or infertile?
A: Our bodies have meaning.
The conjugal union of a man and a woman is not a factory to produce
babies; marriage seeks to create a total community of love, a "one
flesh" union of mind, heart and body that includes a willingness to care
for any children their bodily union makes together.
Two
men and two women can certainly have a close loving committed emotional
relationship, but they can never ever join as one flesh in the unique
way a husband and wife do.
Infertility is, as you point
out, part of the natural life cycle of marriage (people age!), as well
as a challenge and disappointment some husbands and wives have to go
through. People who have been married for 50 years are no less married
because they can no longer have children.
Adoption can be
a wonderful happy ending for children who lack even one parent able or
willing to care for them. But notice, when a man and woman cannot have
children together, that's an accident of circumstances, the exception to
the rule. When a husband and wife adopt, they are mirroring the pattern
set in nature itself. ...
Treating same-sex
relationships as marriage is the final severing by government of the
natural link between marriage and the great task of bringing together
male and female to make and raise the next generation together in love.
Q:
Is it particularly difficult for you to play a leading role against gay
marriage in a place like San Francisco? Does it change your
relationship with gay congregants?
A: Truthfully, I am
really excited to be in San Francisco. I remember the first time I saw
the city as a boy when our family drove up from San Diego to meet my
father who was unloading his tuna boat here. ... To me San Francisco
was and is The City! It represents vibrant, pulsating, creative,
cosmopolitan life and I love it. Of course I realize many people in San
Francisco disagree with the church's teachings on marriage and sex, but
there is also a very deeply embedded Catholic culture here with many
people who understand and cherish the church's teachings. My job as an
archbishop is to teach the truths of our faith and the truths of the
natural moral law, and whatever challenges that entails I embrace with
enthusiasm.
We can learn to respect each other across
differences and even to love one another. That's my hope anyway. And
my job description.
Q: Has it become more difficult to oppose gay marriage over the years? Does it seem the tide is turning against you?
A:There
is a problem here – an injustice, really – in the way that some people
are so often identified by what they are against. Opposition to
same-sex marriage is a natural consequence of what we are for, i.e., preserving the traditional, natural understanding of marriage in the culture and in the law.
But
of course people who are for the redefinition of marriage to include
two men or two women are also against something: They are against
protecting the social and legal understanding that marriage is the union
of a husband and wife who can give children a mother and father.
So
there are really two different ideas of marriage being debated in our
society right now, and they cannot coexist: Marriage is either a
conjugal union of a man and a woman designed to unite husband and wife
to each other and to any children who may come from their union, or it
is a relationship for the mutual benefit of adults which the state
recognizes and to which it grants certain benefits. Whoever is for one,
is opposed to the other. ...
Those of us who favor
preserving the traditional understanding of marriage do not do so
because we want people who experience attraction to their same sex to
suffer. We recognize and respect the equal human dignity of everyone.
Everyone should be treated equally, but it is not discrimination to
treat differently things that are different. Marriage really is unique
for a reason.
Q: Do you have friends or family members who are gay? How do you balance your public policy positions with those relationships?
A:
Of course! I am a Baby Boomer, and I grew up in Southern California.
The larger question you raise about my relationships with people I care
about is: How can we love each other across deep differences in moral
views? The answer I have found is that when we want to stay in
relationship, we can and do. Love finds a way. When we want to exclude
or hate, we find each other's views literally intolerable.
Of
course, it helps that my friends know me, directly and unfiltered
through any other source. When you know someone personally, it's much
harder to rely on stereotyped or media-created images. It's a lot
harder to be hateful or prejudiced against a person, or group of people,
that one knows personally. When there is personal knowledge and human
interaction, the barriers of prejudice and pre-conceived ideas come
down.
Q: What are your main goals: Supreme Court, lower courts, state legislatures, public opinion, religious liberty?
A:
My main goal is none of these. I'm a faith leader, and my main goal is
to seek to create a Catholic community in San Francisco where people
know what the church teaches and uses this knowledge to guide their own
lives and get to heaven. I want to help people understand the truth of
natural marriage and, for people of my own faith, the deeper,
theological, even mystical meaning of marriage as designed by God.
Using
words, though, is only one way of teaching. Usually one's actions
speak louder than words. So there is a place for public manifestations
of principle. The civil rights marches of the '60s are a good example
of that. Yes, they were a way to agitate for long overdue political
change, but they also had a teaching effect in that they got people to
think about the injustices of racism.
Engaging with the broader culture is also part of my teaching role as an archbishop, and of course my right as U.S. citizen.
Q: Are you worried about the recent trend in courts and states going against you? How best to stop that trend?
A: The natural law has a power written on the human heart that doesn't go away.
Notice
how there is no controversy in this country now over the evil of Jim
Crow laws. Shortly after the Civil Rights Act the cultural change was
complete. This is because it was the right thing to do. The truth
cannot be suppressed indefinitely.
Draw a contrast here with the pro-life movement: After the Roe
decision, it was commonly thought that our society would soon easily
accept the legitimacy of abortion. But what has happened? The pro-life
movement is stronger now, 40 years later, than it ever has been. This
is because of the truth: Abortion is the killing of an innocent human
life. That is not a matter of opinion or religious belief; it is a
simple fact that cannot be denied.
The same
principle applies with marriage: It is simply a natural fact that you
need a man and a woman to make a marriage and that a child's heart longs
for the love of both his or her mother and father. Even if the Supreme
Court rules against this truth, the controversy will not die out, as it
hasn't on the abortion issue.
The problem is, the
longer a society operates in denial of the truth, the greater is the
harm that will be done. The examples of the racist policies and
practices of the past in our own country make this clear, as does all
the harm that abortion has done to women and all those in her network of
relationships.
With marriage, we have to consider
the harm that will be caused by enshrining in the law the principle
that children do not need a mother and a father. The circumstances of
our struggles change but the truth does not.
