Pelosi feuds with archbishop again

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rekindled her long-running feud with the San Francisco archbishop, saying Thursday that he was an “extreme” opponent of LGBTQ rights.

Pelosi, a Catholic Democrat, has quarreled with San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone for years over her support for abortion rights.

“Every parade against women honoring their own sense of responsibility or LGBTQ, he leads. And so he’s made it very clear, maybe we’re not all god’s children, maybe we don’t all have a free will,” Pelosi said Thursday.

She made the remarks in response to an audience question during an event at Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice. The conflict between the two top San Francisco figures shot into the spotlight in 2021 when Cordileone began a campaign to persuade Pelosi to stop supporting abortion rights. He issued a notice in May 2022 that he would no longer allow Pelosi to receive Communion, and she responded by suggesting that he and other anti-abortion activists had ulterior motives and were ignoring other parts of Catholicism.

In response to Pelosi’s latest remarks, Cordileone sent a statement that did not directly acknowledge her and said, “for the sake of the children, let us do everything possible to build a society that maximizes the chances of a child growing up with, and knowing and being loved by, a mother and father in a life-long, lowconflict relationship.”

Pelosi pointed to Cordileone’s efforts as a key fundraiser for Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. More recently, he urged U.S. senators to reject the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex marriage from a potential rollback by the Supreme Court.

“We’ve had very, very negative anti-LGBTQ stuff coming from our archbishop and others. He was responsible for putting on the ballot Proposition 8 because he had all of this conservative money,” Pelosi said.