These days of Christian devotion (we are in the middle of Holy Week ) seems to have encouraged the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to make an effort to be unsympathetic and show their media strength in their tireless fight for social involution and, in this case, the spread of homophobia. So far, surely nothing new. The problem comes when in their verbal excesses they insult and skip the legality of a State that, simultaneously, frees the Catholic Church from tax burdens and finances it in a substantial and extraordinary way by mandate inherited from the previous political regime.
The statements of the bishop de Alcalá, televised by Spanish public TV, leave little room for conjecture: «Since they are children, they think that they are attracted to people of the same sex and, sometimes, to prove it, they corrupt themselves and prostitute themselves or go to men’s nightclubs I assure you that they find hell. The text is full of similar outrages (also against people who decide to abort in the free exercise of their rights and other deviant people).
Citizens, through their political representatives and perhaps also the State Attorney’s Office, should review the legality of such statements (and of many of the homophobic communications and indoctrinations that spread through the pulpits) made, to make matters worse, by a entity paid at the neckline by all citizens, Catholics or not. The defense of our rule of law does not know of Easter truces. For similar nonsense against human rights and the Law, others are outlawed and prosecuted.
But the Church of Rome is not alone in its crusade. Today, El País also echoes the situation in neighboring Russia where the Orthodox Church makes its growing power felt in Russian society and stigmatizes with its influential tentacles everything that sounds like emancipation and social freedoms. Here, unlike Europe, the State does not accompany the persecuted and homophobia is strong in Russia.
At the other end of the map, in Santiago de Chile, Daniel Zamudio, a young activist who defends the rights of homosexuals, is beaten. In an illuminating article, Mario Vargas Llosa, shells out the entrails of Ibero-American society where not only the Catholic and Evangelical churches display their sectarianism, but both right-wing movements and left-wing revolutionaries make common cause against that part of society.
So much to do! Fortunately, our society, our civilization, walks firmly on the path of tolerance and coexistence. I have no doubt. Today, like two hundred years ago, liberty, equality and fraternity continue to be the pillars on which to build democracy and these pillars are becoming more and more solid. Here unbeatable, if the democratic powers that we have endowed among all of us watch their full compliance, also when it comes to the Catholic Church.
While we manage to universalize these democratic virtues: go this little post as a show of solidarity with those persecuted in the world for their sexual orientation.
Eutsi gogor!
. It certainly doesn’t make much sense to follow up on the statements of the Bishop of Alcalá but, deep down, they are so funny that I can’t resist sharing them (El País includes them in its online edition of April 16).
Reig Pla recommends “appropriate therapy” and “chastity “to the gays