While we’re on the topic:

A San Francisco city and county board resolution that officially labeled the Catholic church’s moral teachings on homosexuality as “insulting to all San Franciscans,” “hateful,” “defamatory,” “insensitive” and “ignorant” will be challenged tomorrow in court for violating the Constitution’s prohibition of government hostility toward religion.

[snip]

Since no law was enacted, she ruled, city officials – even in their official capacity as representatives of the government – can say what they want.

“It is merely the exercise of free speech rights by duly elected office holders,” she wrote.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is appealing the District Court decision on behalf of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and two Catholic residents of San Francisco, disagrees with Patel’s decision.

“Sadly, the ruling itself clearly exhibited hostility toward the Catholic Church,” he said in a statement. “The judge in her written decision held that the Church ‘provoked the debate’ by publicly expressing its moral teaching, and that by passing the resolution the City responded ‘responsibly’ to all of the ‘terrible’ things the Church was saying.”

Thomas More attorney Robert Muise will present oral arguments in the case tomorrow morning in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Our Constitution plainly forbids hostility toward any religion, including the Catholic faith,” he said.

“In total disregard for the Constitution, homosexual activists in positions of authority in San Francisco have abused their authority as government officials and misused the instruments of the government to attack the Catholic Church. Their egregious abuse of power has now the backing of a lower federal court. … Unfortunately, all too often we see a double standard being applied in Establishment Clause cases,” Muise said.

Thomas More attorneys argued in the District Court case that the “anti-Catholic resolution sends a clear message” that Catholics are “outsiders, not full members of the political community.”

The cultural, and now political, straight-arm to adherents of the Christian faith in San Francisco has been increasingly public in the last two years. Just one week after the anti-Catholic resolution was passed, the San Francisco Board issued a similar resolution against a mostly evangelical group.

Following a gathering of 25,000 teens at San Francisco’s AT&T Park as part of Ron Luce’s Teen Mania “Battle Cry for a Generation” rally against the sexualization of America’s youth culture by advertisers and media, the board spoke out formally again.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution condemning the “act of provocation” by what it termed an “anti-gay,” “anti-choice” organization that aimed to “negatively influence the politics of America’s most tolerant and progressive city.”

Openly homosexual California Assemblyman Mark Leno told protesters of the teen rally that though such religious people may be few, “they’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco.”

[snip]

Currently, as WND has reported, Colorado and Michigan are tackling the question of whether the Bible itself can be vilified as “hate speech” for it’s condemnation of homosexuality, and Canada has developed human rights commissions, which have decided people cannot express opposition to homosexuality without fear of government reprisal.

This is the difference between the position that I hold and those expressed in my comment box yesterday: I oppose legalizing and promoting behaviors which I believe are immoral but do NOT oppose the Constitutional right of those who hold opposing views to speak about them or associate as a group; homosexual activists want to use the government’s power as a weapon against people who disagree with them and strip them of the freedoms to which they are already entitled by law.

Ezra Levant was a case study. Don’t believe for a moment that those who want to silence the voices advocating traditional morality won’t learn from the mistakes of Canada’s Human Rights Commission and try again. There is a growing contempt for the belief that the homosexual lifestyle is sinful and destructive to the soul, and that “homosexual marriage” is a contradiction in terms - a contradiction made possible through the weakening of our understanding that children are the primary good of marriage, a weakening produced by the widespread adoption of contraception. Our beliefs on marriage and sexuality are now considered thought crimes, no doubt a thought “hate crimes” by those who advocate that sexual pleasure and the desire for interpersonal intimacy alone should define marriage and relationships.

A century ago, Chesterton captured with elegant simplicity what is wrong with that sort of definition:

“The creation of a new creature, not ourselves, of a new conscious centre, of a new and independent focus of experience and enjoyment, is an immeasurably more grand and godlike act that even a real love affair; how much more superior to a momentary physical satisfaction. If creating another self is not noble, why is pure self-indulgence nobler?”

G.K. Chesterton, “Blasphemy and the Baby,” reprinted in Brave New Family

Chesterton’s wisdom has long since been overruled, and those of us who are willing to accept as many children as God desires to grant us are scorned for for placing a priority on procreation over pleasure.

Ultimately, I assume, the difference in approach can be attributed to eschatology - for Catholics, we must work for a just and moral society, but we know that Christ is the arbiter of all things and will sit in final judgement. We have a sense of urgency, but not a sense of desperation, and certainly not a need for vengeance.

But to those who feel hated because we love them enough to tell them that what they are doing is wrong, and will imperil their eternal happiness, the desire is strongest to simply shut us up. To make us go away. To harass us sufficiently with charges of “hate speech” and “defamation” and “insensitivity” that we will no longer be able to afford to fight their legal challenges.

They champion free speech unless it is our free speech; they champion the separation of church and state but not of ideology and state; and when all is said and done, they have the sympathy of the secular society and there seems to be only so much we can do to stop them.

Forgive me if I find it hard to swallow when I am accused of taking a play from their book simply because I disapprove of their agenda.

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