Monday, August 23, 2010

Church v. State : the Roman Catholics take on the courts in Mexico and the US

In Mexico, same sex marriages are now legal.
The court hewed to Mexico's strict separation of church and state and said the constitution did not indicate that marriage had to be defined as the union of a man and woman. To deny gay couples the right to adopt, the court said, would amount to discrimination.

"There is nothing that indicates that homosexual couples are less apt parents than heterosexual ones," Justice Arturo Zaldivar said in televised proceedings this week.
In sputtering fury, Cardinal Sandoval Iniguez of Guadalajara accused the Mexican Supreme Court judges and Mayor Ebrard of Mexico City of being bribed.

The LA Times further reports,
Sandoval made the allegations on Sunday during an event in Aguascalientes state. He also used a slur against gays while decrying the recent high court decisions that were called victories for the gay-rights community......

In the secular institutional corner, the Supreme Court censured Sandoval's statements unanimously, and Ebrard issued a stark warning to the highest-ranking prelate of Mexico's second-largest city: "We live in a secular state, and here, whether we like it or not, the law rules the land," Ebrard said....

"The cardinal must submit to the law of the land, like all other citizens of this country."

The US Roman Catholic Bishops are also pushing back against the courts, this time over the Prop8 decision.
Cardinal Francis George, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), rejected [Judge Vaughn] Walker's claims, stating that "no court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined."....

Fr. Francis de Rosa, parochial administrator of two parishes in Virginia, responded to the judge’s ruling in an e-mail to CNSNews.com. “We are not opposed to the human rights of someone with same-sex attraction,” he wrote. “Rather, we assert that there is no such thing as a special category of ‘gay’ rights. Why? Because homosexuality is a pyscho-sexual disorder that harms the person and society.”
 
“Condoning such behavior and encouraging people to engage in it by the passage of permissive and protective laws does the real harm, not the position that warns people of the destructive consequences and nature of homosexual acts,” wrote Fr. De Rosa.
Did you get that? NEver mind the view of actual medical and scientific bodies that being gay is not a pathology. No, to the RC's, it's a birth defect, a variant to be cured.

We need to remember that the Roman Catholic church, in particular its current Pope, have referred to gays as "objectively disordered", simply by being gay, and our lives and loves as an "intrinsic moral evil". The vicious lies are apparent in the quotes above. The gross moral evil is the mediaeval views of the Roman Catholic church, that attacks GLBT people, that considers women second class, and rates an attempt to ordain women as no better than child abuse.

1 comment:

James said...

Don't tell me you were surprised by this Neanderthal science and religious views. (Apologies to the Neanderthals for implying that these people are as advanced as Neanderthals.) We know the key phrases and rhetoric of hate/fear that is going to spew from their mouths. It's the scrip. You and I can write the next ten press releases in advance for them about anything dealing with equal rights for GLBT people.