“Devout Catholic” Nancy Pelosi has taken to lecturing her own archbishop in San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, urging him not to attend the 2014 March for Marriage in DC on June 19.
Saying that some of the participants show “disdain and hate toward LGBT persons,” Pelosi claimed the march is “venom masquerading as virtue.” The is the second annual March for Marriage, whose sponsors this year include the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Declaration, and two Catholic archdioceses.
Cordileone also participated last year, having led the marchers in prayer while the Supreme Court heard arguments for Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case challenging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman and was passed in November 2008.
Archbishop Cordileone is one of the featured speakers for the march, alongside Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and religious leaders from a variety of Christian denominations. Cordileone, a staunch defender of traditional marriage, has been called “the father of Prop 8,” having done extensive fundraising and organizing to ensure its passing. He is currently the Chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee on the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.
Appropriating Pope Francis’s famous (and widely misunderstood) statement about gay priests made last summer, Pelosi wrote “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” The pope’s statement was not an affirmation of homosexuality, however, as the fuller quote makes clear: “The problem is not having this tendency, no, we must be brothers and sisters to one another, and there is this one and there is that one. The problem is in making a lobby of this tendency: a lobby of misers, a lobby of politicians, a lobby of masons, so many lobbies.” He was instead distinguishing a person struggling with homosexuality privately from those demanding acceptance of it from the Church and society.
Explaining his opposition to gay marriage in a 2011 interview with the National Catholic Register, Cordileone said that “This is not a matter of religion. This is how every society has understood marriage in all of human history. The truth is: They’re imposing their new idea of marriage — an idea no society has ever had before — on everyone else. This is a very serious social experiment that will have dire consequences.”
He has also criticized conceiving of marriage as “solely for the benefit of adults” and the passage of no-fault divorce laws, which he says erode essential goods of marriage–procreation and permanence.
Pelosi has used her faith to justify her support for both gay marriage and abortion–serious enough dissensions from Catholic teaching to merit barring from Communion. “My religion has, compels me–and I love it for it–to be against discrimination of any kind in our country, and I consider this a form of discrimination,” she said in 2012. (RELATED: Priests to Pelosi: Condemn abortion or leave the Church)
“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,” said Cordileone in a 2013 interview. “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.”
