The U.S. Supreme Court is considering whether to review a petition by
a non-profit law firm to reverse a radical ruling by the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals, one that upheld a San Francisco City Council
resolution condemning the Catholic faith.
I respectfully urge the justices to take the case, or, in legalese, grant certiorari to the petition.
The Thomas More Law Center filed the petition for appellate review
with The Supreme Court of the United States on February 16, 2011, though
it has not been covered by national media.
No wonder.
As noted religion writer Philip Jenkins put it in his 2004 book, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford
University Press), those who dislike the Catholic church state their
prejudiced views in a “completely casual way” which anticipates that
“any normal person should be expected to share these beliefs.”
The San Francisco politicians’ resolution, adopted March 21, 2006,
refers to the Church‘s moral teaching and beliefs on homosexuality as
“insulting to all San Franciscans,” as well as “hateful,” “callous,” and
“ignorant.”
The resolution is available online.
Years of Litigation
Litigation, based on the First Amendment’s establishment clause,
which bars discrimination against Americans based on their religious
beliefs, began almost immediately after the resolution passed, and is
now at the steps of the Supreme Court, nearly five years later.
Famed Catholic columnist Fr. Andrew Greely has written that
anti-Catholicism today is quite widespread, but “not explicitly and
self-consciously rejected,” in the way that racial bigotry has been in
the U.S.
The drafters of the resolution, in my legal analysis, slyly attempted
to get around the establishment clause, and the protection that the
Church and its members have for their traditionalist views here in the
U.S., by directing their vitriol at the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI’s
equivalent of a president’s cabinet, and by calling the Roman Catholic
church a “foreign power,” which was intermeddling in the internal
policies of the U.S.
“It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country like
the Vatican meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great
city’s established and existing customs and traditions such as the
right of same sex couples to adopt and care for children in need,”
states the resolution by the San Francisco City Council, signed by Mayor
Gavin Newsom.
Really, though, the San Francisco resolution is an ironic insult to
the average person’s intelligence.
We know that the Constitution
prohibits states, and by inference cities, from conducting their own
foreign policy.
So that tactic is too clever by half for the city
council members.
What is more, San Francisco is, itself, named after Saint Francis,
one of the great saints of the Catholic tradition, who espoused
obedience to church teaching.
According to traditional Catholic
doctrine, allowing children to be adopted by homosexuals would not be as
conductive to their development as being in a traditional home with a
mother and a father.
The Obama administration’s own social science
bears out the fact that traditional families are better for the
psychological development of kids, as The Washington Times reported recently.
The Church has been around a lot longer than the city of San
Francisco, so if “established and existing customs” are the standards
that the drafters of the resolution wish to uphold, they have about 2000
years of established customs and standards from the church to contend
with here.
Legally speaking, what the lawyers are seeking for the church in
their SCOTUS petition is the reversal of a seeming double standard on
freedom of religion and freedom of speech in the public square.
“The Ninth Circuit prohibits a government display of the passive symbol of the war memorial cross on Mt. Soledad [in another famous case], yet it expressly approves of the government‘s explicit condemnation of Catholic religious beliefs.
This outrageous double standard is made possible by the Supreme
Court‘s flawed tests by which it interprets the Establishment Clause of
the First Amendment—an interpretation that is hostile toward religion,”
says Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, the
non-profit law firm that filed the petition.
“The First Amendment …forbids an official purpose to disapprove of a
particular religion, religious beliefs, or of religion in general. The
Board‘s resolution went so far as to urge the Archbishop of San
Francisco and Catholic Charities of San Francisco to defy Church
directives.”
This past October, in an 11-judge opinion in which three judges
concluded that TMLC should prevail in the First Amendment case, three
judges concluded that the City should prevail, and five judges concluded
that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case.
As Circuit Judge Kleinfeld appropriately observed in his initial opinion on the case:
“The message in the resolution, unlike, say, the message that might be inferred from some symbolic display, is explicit:
a Catholic doctrine duly communicated by the part of the Catholic
church in charge of clarifying doctrine is ‘hateful, defamatory,
insulting, callous, and discriminatory, showing insensitivity and
ignorance, the Catholic Church is a hateful foreign meddler in San
Francisco‘s affairs, the Catholic Church ought to withdraw its religious
directive, and the local archbishop should defy his superior‘s
directive.’ This is indeed a message of . . . disapproval. And that is
all it takes for it to be unconstitutional.”
We agree with Judge Kleinfeld, and urge the Supreme Court to as well.
Bishop Koprowski is founder of the Priestly Society of Sts. Cyril
and Methodius, which promotes reconciliation among all Catholic and
Eastern Orthodox churches.