On [yesterday’s] episode of “Ellen,” Joe Biden told Ellen DeGeneres “that if I lived in California, I would vote against Proposition 8.” This initiative reads, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Yet in his debate with Sarah Palin on October 2, Biden said that “Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage.”
Catholic League president Bill Donohue weighed in on this today:
“Proposition 8 is a civil initiative that would secure marriage as an institution that is exclusively between a man and a woman, and Joe Biden told Ellen DeGeneres that he is opposed to that measure. In other words, Biden did not tell the truth in his debate with Sarah Palin. He cannot logically be opposed to both gay marriage and Proposition 8, but that is exactly what he is trying to get away with. More important, Biden is openly defying both the pope and the bishops.
“Last year, in his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict XVI pointedly said the following about people like Joe Biden: ‘Worship pleasing to God can never be a purely private matter…it is especially incumbent upon those who, by virtue of their social or political position, must make decisions regarding fundamental values such as respect for human life, its defence from conception to natural death, the family built upon marriage between a man and a woman….These values are not negotiable.’ (My emphasis.)
“Last year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship wherein it said that the family based on marriage between a man and a woman ‘should be defended and strengthened, not redefined or undermined by permitting same-sex unions or other distortions of marriage.’
“Biden is in a major jam. He needs to hold a press conference explaining his irreconcilable moral positions, and why he has chosen to defy the pope and the bishops.”
