Pope Benedict XIV made his clearest independent statement yet on gay marriage yesterday, perpetuating the Catholic church's conservative stance against homosexuals, a hard line position that not only excludes many of that church's gay followers but also nurtures an overall climate of intolerance that fuels violence and hatred towards homosexuals worldwide.
“The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man.”
Benedict's statements are not a surprise. Many expected this message would come sooner or later.
The notion that a world with millions of unmarried gays is somehow a better kind of anarchy than a world in which those same gays are allowed to express their devotion to one another through the institution of marriage is a notion based in a hateful kind of oppression. Watch out for this Pope, he's just out of the starting gate and eating up the track. Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Pope Says Gay Unions are False [boston globe]
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