SAN FRANCISCO'S BLAST AT VATICAN WAS LEGAL, COURT RULES: The San Francisco Chronicle

reports:

San Francisco didn't cross into constitutionally forbidden territory of government hostility to religion when the Board of Supervisors denounced a Vatican order to Catholic Charities not to place adoptive children with same-sex couples, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The 2006 resolution condemned the Vatican's "hateful and discriminatory rhetoric" and urged local church officials to defy the order by Cardinal William Levada. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights sued, contending the city was expressing hostility toward Catholicism in violation of the Constitution.

A federal judge threw out the suit, a decision that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld Wednesday. It said the supervisors had acted for a legal secular purpose - to protect gay and lesbian couples from discrimination - and not to express the city's disapproval of Catholicism.

"The board's focus was on same-sex couples, not Catholics," Judge Richard Paez said in the 3-0 ruling. Promoting equal treatment for those couples in adoptions isn't anti-religious, he said, "regardless of whether the Catholic Church may be opposed to it as a religious tenet."

Judge Marsha Berzon, in a separate opinion, said the resolution was close to the constitutional boundary and might have been invalid if it contained binding regulations or was part of a "pervasive public campaign" against the Catholic Church. ...

In response, Catholic Charities of San Francisco stopped placing children for adoption, the same step it has taken in Massachusetts and other areas with similar nondiscrimination policies, said Brian Rooney, a lawyer at the Thomas More Law Center, which sued San Francisco on behalf of the Catholic League.

more (the Catholic Key blog has posted the resolution here, so you can decide for yourself whether it expresses "disapproval of Catholicism")

Labels: adoption, California, Catholic Church, religion

posted by Eve at 7:54 PM VOTE

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