The following comes from a Jan. 6 report from our San Francisco correspondent.

The January 1, 2015 issue of the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s newspaper “serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971,” carried a full-page advertisement from Equality California announcing a “town hall meeting” to “learn about EQCA’S expanded mission that advances equality, in and outside California and improves the health and well-being of LGBT Californians…” The January 22 meeting will be hosted by San Francisco’s notorious Most Holy Redeemer Church.

Equality California is the most prominent advocate of gay rights in the state of California. The History and Leadership section of Equality’s Wikipedia page reports that it began in 1998 as the California Alliance for Pride and Equality. The section continues: “In 2004, EQCA merged with a similar organization working on LGBT rights called Marriage Equality California in order to better coordinate efforts to pass marriage equality legislation in California.”

The Wikipedia page continues “[Equality California] has sponsored and helped lobby for the passage of 96 bills supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the California Legislature, including the nation’s first same-sex marriage bill approved by a legislative body (AB 849, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, authored by Assembly member Mark Leno, D-San Francisco). On behalf of its members, Equality California was the organizational plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and several law firms challenging California’s marriage laws that exclude same-sex couples. The California Supreme Court on May 15, 2008 ruled that all Californians have the freedom to marry. The landmark decision ended the state ban on marriage for same-gender couples. Same-gender couples were able to marry as of June 16, 2008.”

That decision was quickly followed by California’s successful Proposition 8. Wikipedia notes that Equality California was “a founding member of Equality for All” which opposed Proposition 8 and was “one of the campaign’s significant contributors.”

When Pope Francis (then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentina) was confronted by an Argentine version of the group in 2010, he said: “At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God. At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts….Let us not be naive: this is not simply a political struggle, but it is an attempt to destroy God’s plan. It is not just a bill (a mere instrument) but a ‘move’ of the father of lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

Ironically, the Ordinary of the archdiocese of San Francisco, of which Most Holy Redeemer is a subject church, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, serves as the head of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, and was instrumental in the passage of Proposition 8.

It is not the first time Most Holy Redeemer has stuck its thumb in Cordileone’s eye — just as it did to Archbishops Niederauer and Levada before him. One recent example occurred on March 26, 2013 when the archbishop spoke in defense of marriage at a rally in Washington DC. As CalCatholic reported at the time, “A scant two hours before, Ms. (Mary Kay) Henry, in the exact same spot, had been addressing a crowd in support of the redefinition of marriage–precisely the opposite message.” The openly homosexual Ms. Henry, who is the international president of the Service Employees International Union, is a parishioner of Most Holy Redeemer, and, in 2007, was listed as one of the church’s lectors on the parish webpage.

The archdiocese of San Francisco can be reached at 415-614-5500
or write to
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone
One Peter Yorke Way
San Francisco CA 94109