Hey, crackpot zealot Archbishop-to-be Sal, you could be just the guy to lead the Church out of its cesspool of lying doody-sackery

The Vatican Friday announced that Bishop Salvatore Cordileone would become the Archbishop of San Francisco, a massive archdiocese that includes the bishops of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City.

Normally such announcements are relatively non-newsworthy outside the Catholic community. But Bishop Cordileone is different: During his tenure as Bishop of Oakland and in his time before that as an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Cordileone has risen to become one of the key figures in the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage not only California but beyond the state’s borders.

-- from Chris Geidner's BuzzFeed report, "The New Archbishop Of San Francisco Gave 'Tremendous Help' To Prop 8 Supporters"

by Ken

Comes the (hardly shocking) news that the Vatican is rewarding yet another of its prized authoritarian zealots, Oakland's "Bishop Sal," with the powerful archbishopric see of San Francisco, which as our colleague Chris Geidner notes includes the bishopric sees of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno, and Salt Lake City, a vast swath of Catholic terra.

There's no reason why the Nazipope and his loyal henchnazis should even blanch lightly at Bishop Sal's background. American Catholics, however, might want to take note of this latest proud instance of Rome grinding its heel in any vestige of opposition to its reign of ideological terror -- in case they missed Pope Cardinal Ratguts's recent blitzkrieg against the American nuns, one of the last remaining vestiges of Catholic offficialdom which professes and practices actual moral principles.

You see, as Chris Geidner notes, Bishop Sal's signal accomplishment and credential is his apparently crucial role in engineering the passage of California's Proposition 8, the Church's successful crusade to strip same-sex couples in that state of the legal -- not religious, but legal -- right to marry.

Here's more of Chris Geidner's report:

In an interview with the Catholic News Agency earlier this month, Cordileone said there could only be "one definition of marriage":

The bishop explained that this issue is of crucial importance because “we cannot have two different definitions of marriage simultaneously in the country.”

“Only one definition of marriage can stand,” he said. “This is not expanding the right of marriage. It’s changing the definition, or taking away something is essential to marriage – that it’s the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the binding of the two and the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring.”

For a video of Cordileone talking at length about this issue, see this video at the Marriage Matters To Kids website. He also, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.

Here's Cordileone speaking at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Religious Freedom Confererence on May 24 of this year:



But it is Cordileone's history supporting Proposition 8 — which has been struck down by two courts as unconstitutional since its 2008 passage and could be headed to the Supreme Court in the coming year — that has gotten the most attention. As Chris Thompson put it in a 2009 article in the East Bay Express, "Father Sal," as he is known, also is "The Father of Proposition 8." From Thompson's story:

What almost no one knows is that without Bishop Sal, gay men and lesbians would almost surely still be able to get married today. As an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Cordileone played an indispensable role in conceiving, funding, organizing, and ultimately winning the campaign to pass Proposition 8. It was Bishop Sal and a small group of Catholic leaders who decided that they had to amend the state constitution. It was Bishop Sal who found the first major donor and flushed the fledgling campaign with cash. It was Bishop Sal who personally brought in the organization that took the lead on the petition drive. And it was Bishop Sal who coordinated the Catholic effort with evangelical churches around the state. Bishop Sal even helped craft the campaign's rhetorical strategy, sitting in on focus groups to hone the message of Proposition 8.

In the case against Proposition 8 brought by the American Foundation for Equal Rights, that story was shown to have a basis in fact. In an email from the Ron Prentice, the chairman of the group that advanced the proposition, that was produced as part of the evidence in the case, a summary of efforts of the supporters of the proposition included this:

Never in California history has an initiative qualified without the help of paid signature gathering. This is where the cooperation of Bishop Cordileone and the San Diego Catholic community offered tremendous help. The bishop sought the help of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), led by Maggie Gallagher, herself a Catholic, with a national reputation for her research and writing on marriage. Gallagher and NOM's executive director, Brian Brown, assisted the bishop in articulating the critical need for a constitutional marriage amendment to hundreds of donors and the national office of the Knights of Columbus, ultimately amounting to more than $900,000 in gifts directed to signature gathering.

In another email from Prentice, read into a deposition of one of AFER's witnesses, the head of the Proposition 8 campaign gave more details about the signature gathering effort:

The total projected cost for the qualification effort has been set at 1.5 million. Thus far, 1.25 million has been raised and spent. The monies have come from four primary sources thus far: The Catholic community of San Diego, due to the involvement of Auxillary Bishop Cordileone, Fieldstead & Company, who pledged 50 cents for each dollar raised in January for the effort, Focus on the Family, and small gifts from direct mail efforts by ProtectMarriage.com.

Cordileone formally will be installed to his new post at an October mass, according to a church spokesman.

HOW (ARCH)BISHOP SAL COULD LEAD THE CHURCH
OUT OF ITS CESSPOOL OF LYING DOODY-SACKERY

At first one might merely say, "Well, that son of a bitch Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done it again! Found just the right guy to solidify the slimification of the U.S. hierarchy. But I'm going to argue that the appointment of Bishop Sal to the San Francisco job in fact offers him and his Church an opportunity to make honest whoring sociopaths of themselves instead of the pathologically lying scum they've become.

How? By inaugurating a thoroughgoing purge of the rolls of Catholic marrieds along the lines set out in his declaration of marital principle above: voiding the marriages of all non-procreating Catholic couples and at the same time committing the Catholic political machine to automatic denial of the legal right to marriage, and of course to any and all legal benefits that marriage may confer, for all couples who violate their legal obligation to procreate.

As this would require a certain amount of redirection of official Catholic activity -- not a change in actual policy (it's merely a technical clarification, after all, to eliminate the glaring dishonesty of its present activity) but an unquestioned change in execution of that policy -- that I want to reserve a fuller discussion of it to tomorrow.

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