Opinion: What does that have to do with same-sex marriage? UPDATED

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SUNDAY UPDATE: Half-truths and mistruths about adoption, field trips and church weddings: See today’s editorial on Proposition 8.

Catholic Charities in San Francisco has done a lot of good works, including finding adoptive homes for the kids most families want nothing to do with -- hard-case, hard-to-place older children who have circled the foster-care world. They have special needs and dark pasts.

And the single biggest group of prospective parents willing to adopt these kids and make homes for them are in gay and lesbian households. An interesting irony when you consider all the muck going on in the anti-gay campaign conducted by Yes on Proposition 8 about how all kids ought to be raised in straight households with their heterosexual mothers and fathers. Most of these children were abused or neglected by their heterosexual mothers and fathers.

Catholic Charities was happy to find good homes in both homosexual and heterosexual households for otherwise unwanted, rejected children. But a couple of years ago, under pressure from church hierarchy not to place children with gay and lesbian parents, yet facing state laws that ban discrimination against gays, the nonprofit stopped doing direct adoption altogether.

Note that this has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, which did not become legal until the state Supreme Court ruling some 18 months later. Similarly, the case of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts that the Yes on 8 people are so fond of bruiting had nothing to do with same-sex marriage, but with anti-discrimination laws and the public funding Catholic Charities received to do the state-contracted work of finding homes for these children. The story of the Mormon adoption agency in Massachusetts -- a successful balancing of religious doctrine and state law that the Times editorial board will explore in detail soon -- offers an interesting contrast to the claims of religious discrimination. But that’’s not a story the Yes on 8 campaign would like you to hear.

As the board prepares to publish its final pre-election editorial on Proposition 8, which would take away the existing right of California’s same-sex couples to marry, it has discovered that the scare stories advertised by the campaign not only are full of untruths and half-truths, but they don’t have anything to do with same-sex marriage itself. Gay and lesbian people still are entitled to adopt, to receive health care, to use public spaces. They were entitled to that before the state Supreme Court ruling, and they’ll be entitled to it after the Tuesday election, unless the next goal of the anti-gay coalition is to deprive them constitutionally of those rights as well.

Unthinkable? Arkansas voters will be deciding a ballot initiative Tuesday under which gay and lesbian households would be unable to adopt. Clearly, fairness -- including fairness to rejected, troubled children who can’t find a stable home -- is not a goal of such campaigns.

Photos by Justin Sullivan and David McNew/Getty Images