Church slams gays

2004-12-26 22:11

Madrid - Spain's powerful Catholic Church on Sunday declared war on government plans to legalise "marriage" and adoption by gay couples, denying the concept of "sexual orientation" and branding homosexual behaviour "intrinsically bad."

The socialist-dominated parliament voted in November to legalise gay marriages from next year and give gay couples the right to adopt children, making the historically conservative country one of the most liberal in Europe.

The move has infuriated the Church, whose bishops announced on December 10 they would organise a day of protest on December 26 to express their opposition and to promote marriage as something to be contracted solely between a man and a woman.

The bishops published on Sunday a statement entitled "Man and Woman Created He Them", charging that "homosexual tendencies, even if not a sin, must be considered objectively as troubling."

"One cannot choose between man and woman," the bishops said, adding that "sexual difference is given to us" and the concept of "sexual orientation" is "erroneous."

"Homosexual behaviour is always ethically reprehensible even if individual culpability must be judged with prudence," the statement said, calling such behaviour "intrinsically bad from the moral point of view."

Marriage is "always and solely the union of a man and a woman," the bishops said. "Two people of the same sex have no right to contract a marriage. The state, for its part, cannot recognise this right which does not exist, without acting in an arbitrary manner."

The government plans "must be opposed clearly and incisively", the statement said, and the right of adoption by gay couples rejected.

The head of the Catholic Church in Spain, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, said in an interview published on Sunday by the daily ABC that homosexuals should not be "illtreated, injured or marginalised" but could not be "placed on the same level as the family."

Earlier this month Spain's constitutional watchdog said another term than "marriage" should be used with regard to gay couples, but this did not prevent the government regulating on "other models of living shared by people of the same sex and attributing to them similar rights to those of marriage."

Marriage was "intrinsically heterosexual", the council of state said, in apparent support for the views of the Church.

Justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said that he would study the council's recommendations, which he said were "technical" and did not call into question the constitutionality of his draft law.

- AFP