It was disappointing enough to learn that the San Francisco Pride Committee decided earlier this year to abandon its annual tradition of bestowing the Pink Brick Award upon the person or institution that had most harmed LGBT interests. Of course, we all wish for the day when calling out our community's foes for bigotry or ignorance will be unnecessary. But little about the preceding year �" one that dealt us a devastating political setback with the passage of Proposition 8 �" would suggest that day has arrived.
Unfortunately, last week's surprise choice of Miss California USA Carrie Prejean to be the Pink Brick recipient this year made a bad decision worse. The improbable recognition for a beauty pageant sideshow doesn't merely trivialize our community's struggle for equality. It also misses an important opportunity to identify a far more influential figure who did as much as anyone to strip the fundamental constitutional right to marry from LGBT citizens in California.
In fact, we need not have looked beyond our own city limits: San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer.
Having served for 11 years as the Catholic bishop of Salt Lake City prior to coming to San Francisco, Niederauer leveraged his close ties to national Mormon leaders last June when he wrote to officials of the Church of Latter-day Saints, urging them to play an active role in the fight to pass Prop 8. And play an active role they did: by most estimates, Mormons accounted for more than half of the $40 million spent in support of the anti-gay amendment.
But Archbishop Niederauer's efforts on behalf of Prop 8 weren't limited to being a key political linchpin for Mormon support.
The San Francisco Archdiocese also produced and distributed campaign fliers to local parishes and schools (acknowledged as having been "Paid for by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco") blithely misinforming recipients that a yes vote on Prop 8 "secures parental rights to teach children about marriage."
Still more outrageous was a campaign Web site called, "Marriage Matters to Kids," to which Archbishop Niederauer lent his support in a prominently featured online video message. Boasting "over 285,000 visitors" prior to Election Day, the pro-Prop 8 site fearsomely declared that: "Legalizing same-sex 'marriage' WILL affect you and your family," and "No state has the authority to deny children their fundamental right to a mother and a father."
And its ominous rhetorical questions went still further:
- "Does the desire of adults to marry anyone they please trump the rights of children to have both a mother and a father?"
- "Are you ready to face 'hate speech' charges for teaching your child the true nature of marriage?"
- "Are you prepared to give up your constitutional right to defend natural marriage?"
That the poisonous tenor of these archdiocese-backed campaign materials far exceeded even the official campaign for Prop 8 deeply troubled many Catholics, myself included. Clearly, no one expected Archbishop Niederauer to break with the Vatican on the issue of marriage equality. But few were prepared for the spiritual leader of 400,000 Bay Area Catholics to offer the imprimatur of our church to such dishonest, divisive and deliberately hurtful rhetoric.
By portraying Prop 8's opposition as an attack on heterosexual parenthood and children �" an effort to literally "deny children their fundamental right to a mother and a father" �" the San Francisco Archdiocese's campaign deliberately played to the most vicious and hateful stereotypes about the LGBT community.
Yet Archbishop Niederauer remains remorseless. His lone published acknowledgment of the campaign offered simply: "Even though we supporters of Proposition 8 did not intend to hurt or offend our opponents, still many of them, especially in the gay community, feel hurt and offended."
If a more convincing rationale were needed to award this year's Pink Brick to Archbishop Niederauer, consider this: those cynical campaign tactics worked.
A California Field Poll from mid-September found that the large majority of Catholic voters �" fully 55 percent �" intended to vote against Prop 8. Catholic support for the amendment at the time stood at just 36 percent, far short of the 52 percent of Protestants who said they would vote yes.
But Election Day exit polls revealed a stunning reversal: California's Catholics voted for Proposition 8 by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent. Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo concluded that the outcome was "affected in a big way in the final weekend by last-minute appeals by the clergy to their parishioners." With Catholic voters comprising nearly a third of the state's electorate, the pivotal shift more than accounted for the margin of Prop 8's victory.
It is not too late for members of the San Francisco Pride Committee to reconsider its decision about this year's Pink Brick recipient �" and it should.
At a critical moment in LGBT history, we owe it to our movement to acknowledge we have foes more formidable than a 22-year-old beauty queen. We owe it to the next campaign for marriage equality to assure our opponents they will be held accountable for their unconscionable tactics. We owe it to our community to Pink Brick Archbishop George Niederauer.
Matt Dorsey is a parishioner of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. The opinion expressed here is his own.