Marriage is primarily about the children, not the adults, such that you cannot be consistently pro-life without being pro-marriage: the two go together. That’s the big picture.

Archbishop Cordileone: Abortion and Marriage Debates are Interrelated

By John Burger

Being pro-life includes standing up for the traditional concept of marriage, says a bishop who is both a national spokesman for traditional marriage and the leader of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, one of the most gay-friendly towns in America.

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone has yoked two social issues that have been understood to be separate and distinct.

In fact, there is some perception (particularly because the huge participation of youth and young adults in major pro-life demonstrations) that even if young Americans are much more conservative on abortion than their elders, they are more sympathetic to a redefinition of marriage.

The Gallup polling organization in 2013 found that 70% of persons aged 18-29 supported legal same-sex “marriage,” a 29-point increase since 1996. Other age categories have shown similar increases, but the young adult group shows the strongest support.

Another recent Gallup survey found that only 54% of 18- to 29-year-olds call themselves “pro-choice,” a majority to be sure, but nothing near the support among the same age group for redefining marriage.

It might not be surprising then to learn that students at a Catholic school in Washington State, for example, were protesting the dismissal of a popular teacher there for having gotten “married” to another man.

In an age when blanket tolerance is upheld as a virtue, it has become difficult for many young people to criticize others for their “alternative” lifestyle choices—or to deny them their “pursuit of happiness” in marriage.

But the focal point in the marriage controversy must be the same as that in the abortion debate, said Archbishop Cordileone: the child.

“The pro-life movement is about more than saving the life of the baby,” the archbishop said during a Mass preceding the Jan. 25 Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco. “It’s about giving that baby all the care, love and nurturing he or she needs to grow up happy and healthy and to achieve his or her total potential in life. It’s about the mother and a whole network of relationships around that baby that the baby needs in such a vulnerable stage of life."

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