The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue offered some stunning candor last night in a conversation with Piers Morgan and the Human Rights Campaign’s incoming executive director Chad Griffin. After arguing a comparison to incest marriage, Donohue openly admitted that he “wants the law to discriminate” against same-sex couples:
DONOHUE: Oh, it’s very simple. It’s absolutely very simple. I have a doctorate in sociology from NYU, and I know what the literature says. The literature is definitive. There is one gold standard, one gold standard for children. That is: there is no substitute for a marriage between a man and a woman. I want the law to discriminate against straight people who live together — I used to call it “shacking up,” but now it’s called cohabitation. I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions. I want to promote and to put in a privileged position that institution of marriage between a man and a woman, which has been shown over and over to be the gold standard.
Watch it:
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Donohue might want to revisit sociology before he makes such grandiose claims. Not a single study has compared married opposite-sex couples to married same-sex couples and found a difference in their parenting ability. Any claim otherwise is a distortion of the research, not a “gold standard.”
With his brutally honest admission that he wants to discriminate, Donohue serves as a unique surrogate for the leadership of the Catholic Church. Though his organization “does not speak authoritatively for the Church,” he seems to say what the bishops are thinking. An open will to discriminate has little do with protecting Catholics from defamation — the actual mission of the Catholic League — just as same-sex couples marrying poses no threat to the religious liberty of practicing Catholics, who largely support marriage equality.