Bishop Olmsted says Prop. 8 decision puts culture's sanity at risk

Weighing in on what he called the “misguided” ruling by a federal judge who struck down California's Proposition 8 last week, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona declared on Tuesday evening, what “is at stake here is cultural sanity and viability.” 

On  Aug. 4, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Proposition 8, an initiative which passed in November 2008 with the support of seven million Californians, both “unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”

The constitutionality of Prop. 8 was challenged immediately after it was approved in 2008. Last week's ruling was appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals by traditional marriage supporters and may even reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a statement released on the Diocese of Phoenix's website on Tuesday, Bishop Olmsted wrote that the “misguided decision of Judge Vaughn Walker, striking down as unconstitutional the California Marriage Law called Proposition 8, cannot be passed over in silence.”

“Labeling homosexual 'marriage' as 'a right' is not an enlightened idea of the 21st century,” the bishop asserted. “It is a novel form of a resurrected falsehood from more than 2000 years ago. It will not stand the test of time, just as it cannot withstand popular opinion now.”

“In every state in our nation where this issue has been put to a vote of the people (31 of the 50), traditional marriage has won,” Olmsted noted. “It is only some activist judges, exercising raw judicial power over and against the will of the people, who have pushed their agenda of so-called 'homosexual marriage.'”  

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