A Catholic bishop who was instrumental in creating California’s Proposition 8 says that same sex marriage is a natural impossibility and granting marriage rights for LGBT couples “is like legalizing male breastfeeding.”

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone recently told the Catholic Herald that the “truth is clear” that it “discriminates against no one” to insist that children have a mother and a father.

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“Every child has a father and a mother, and either you support the only institution that connects a child with their father and mother or you don’t,” he insisted. “Adoption, by a mother and father, mirrors the natural union of a mother and father and provides a balanced, happy alternative for when a child may not be reared by their biological parents.”

Cordileone warned Catholics not to use the Bible as a defense when arguing against marriage rights because “you will play into their hands and they will say you use religion to control people.”

In fact, the archbishop told the Catholic Herald‘s Mary O’Regan that “gay marriage” was a nonsense term that Catholics should avoid.

“[I]t should be used ‘only sparingly’ because it is a natural impossibility and if we keep talking about gay marriage we might fool ourselves into thinking it is an authentic reality, which only needs government approval to make it legitimate,” O’Regan wrote.

“Legislating for the right for people of the same sex to marry is like legalizing male breastfeeding,” Cordileone said.

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Throughout history there have been examples of men lactating, and the United States currently has no law against male breastfeeding. Pulitzer Prize-winning former physiologist Jared Diamond even thinks it makes a lot of sense.

“Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their young, male milk production could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family,” The Scientific American‘s Nikhil Swaminathan reported in 2007. “Why else would men still have nipples?”

After O’Regan recalled that she had avoided debates about marriage equality because she did not want her journalism career to suffer, Cordileone asserted that the opponents of same sex marriage were the true victims of intolerance and discrimination.

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“You say that you can’t debate it without suffering for your beliefs, so who is being discriminated against?” he asked. “Who is being intolerant? It is the secular orthodoxy that allows no dissent and will punish those who do.”

Cordileone was charged with drunk driving in August last year, just one month after Pope Benedict XVI announced that he had been appointed to serve as the Metropolitan Archbishop of San Francisco.

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(h/t: Think Progress)