Well, it is almost football season.

Over the past couple of weeks, there’s been much discussion here and there about San Francisco Catholic Charities’ "compromise" on placement of children with homosexual couples, in contrast, for example, to the decision of Boston CC to simply get out of the adoption business, period.

What has become clear, however, is that the compromise is an end-run of sorts, and was crafted as a means to strengthen the role of Catholic Charities in these placements.

At Catholic World Report, George Neumayr (CWR’s new editor) sums up the controversy and lets us know who’s happy:

Archbishop Niederauer announced in early August that Catholic Charities would no longer supervise the "direct placement" of adopted children, including to homosexual households, but would send three staff members to work in Oakland for Family Builders By Adoption, an organization that specializes, according to its Web site, in helping "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender {LGBT} families" adopt children. (Catholic Charities will also provide the group with resources and assist the state’s department of social services.)

Advocates for homosexual adoption in San Francisco quickly celebrated the new partnership. "We’re about the gayest adoption agency in the country," Jill Jacobs, director of Family Builders by Adoption (which runs the network California Kids Connection), told the Bay Area Reporter, a homosexual newspaper. Jacobs confidently said that the new partnership poses no risk to its pro-homosexual policies since she had made it clear to Catholic Charities "who we were, and that in our own adoption program more than half the families we serve are LGBT families."

Tom Ammiano, a homosexual activist and San Francisco Supervisor, called the new policy at Catholic Charities a "decent solution." He also noted to the Bay Area Reporter what homosexual activists regard as a happy irony: a Vatican-mandated review that was supposed to terminate Catholic Charities’ involvement in homosexual adoptions has ended up increasing it. The resources and employees Catholic Charities plans to send over to Family Builders By Adoption will "enhance the number of adoptions in general but also for same-sex couples," he said.

Ammiano complimented Catholic Charities of San Francisco executive director Brian Cahill, who is a longtime opponent of the Church’s teaching on homosexual adoption, for "crafting this; in Boston they just rolled over and didn’t do anything. And so I’d say onward and upward, and gayly forward."

Expanding on one of Neumayr’s points: The president of SF Catholic Charities is Clint Reilly, real estate magnate and political consultant extraordinaire for California Democrats who are, naturally, pro-abortion rights, pro-same sex marriage to a fault. And, as Dom noted a few months ago, was one of the nominees for Catholic Charities USA’s "Volunteer of the Year." His wife Janet Reilly, ran (and lost) in race for the Democratic nomination for the California Assembly on an abortion-rights platform. And hosted Archbishop Levada’s going away party.

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