The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that San Francisco acted
for legal and secular purposes and not to express the city's
disapproval of Catholics when its Board of Supervisors
denounced a Vatican order to Catholic Charities not to place adoptive
children with same-sex couples.
The 2006 resolution condemned the Vatican's "hateful and discriminatory rhetoric" and urged local church officials to defy the order by Cardinal William Levada, SF Gate reports.
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 US 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.
The board passed the nonbinding resolution, sponsored by then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano, in March 2006, days after Cardinal Levada, former archbishop of the San Francisco Archdiocese, issued his decree as leader of the church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Cardinal Levada said Catholic agencies "should not place children for adoption in homosexual households." Quoting a statement by the Vatican office, he said allowing children to be adopted by same-sex couples "would actually mean doing violence to these children."
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S.F.'s blast at Vatican was legal, court says (SF Gate)