Thoughts from Kansas

Students of the creation/evolution conflict know the Thomas More Law Center as the conservative legal group who encouraged the Dover school board to undertake their disastrous policies. TMLC lost badly, and left Dover on the hook for over a million dollars in legal fees. TMLC dropped plenty of their own money on the case, too, money donated by the founder of Dominos Pizza.

TMLC is at it again, stirring up baseless legal fights to promote their religious agenda. And when they lost, things got really ugly. The SF Chrnocile explains, "Religious right group likens S.F. supes to Nazis":

"It is not a stretch to compare the San Francisco board's actions to that of the Nazi Germany policy of Gleichschaltung, vilifying Jews as an auxiliary to and laying the groundwork for more repressive policies, including the final solution of extermination." [said TMLC's Richard Thompson]

He was referring to the supervisors' March 2006 resolution denouncing a Vatican order to Catholic Charities not to place adoptive children with same-sex couples.

Disproportionate, much?

In the decree, Cardinal William Levada, the former San Francisco archbishop who now heads the church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said allowing gay or lesbian couples to adopt children "would actually mean doing violence to these children."

The nonbinding board resolution, sponsored by then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano, said the Vatican order contained "hateful and discriminatory rhetoric" and urged local Catholic officials, including Levada's successor as archbishop, George Niederauer, to disregard it. In response, Catholic Charities of San Francisco stopped placing children for adoption with any families.

A Catholic group sued, claiming the statement constituted religious discrimination. The courts disagreed, noting that preventing discrimination was a valid secular purpose.

That's when the TMLC declared this to be tantamount to the Holocaust, a statement which a spokesman later modified, telling the Chronicle: "We're not saying that the resolution is going to lead toward extermination of Catholics." Resolution sponsor Tom Ammiano notes correctly that this sort of language "trivializes what the Nazis did." No one points this out, but it seems worth noting that the Nazis didn't have much good to say about gays, and probably would agree with the Catholic Church's position here.

While we're at it, there's no evidence that kids who get adopted by gay parents are worse off than those adopted by straight parents. There's lots of evidence that they do better than kids left in foster care or in group homes. But to avert the nonexistent danger of gay adoption, the Catholic Church is stopping all adoptions in San Francisco. As if Catholic priests have proven themselves to be models for childcare.