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NZ Legalizes Gay Civil Unions

WELLINGTON, April 26, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – New Zealand ushered in civil union legislation today conferring upon same-sex couples all the rights and privileges normally allotted to heterosexual married husbands and wives.

The new law also allows common-law heterosexual couples to formalize their unions without conceding to the full pact of marriage.

Conservative National Party leader Don Brash said lawmakers were “preoccupied with social engineering,” according to a theage.com.au report. “I voted against it on the second reading on the grounds that this was quite a major change in civil society, and it might well be desirable to have that sort of major issue decided by referendum rather than parliamentary vote,” Brash said.

The Catholic Church has attempted to warn the world about serious moral and social consequences of such developments. Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, spoke in the issue at the International Conference on the Family in Doha, Qatar in November. “Recognition of ‘de facto’ unions,” he said, “which are a legal fiction, proposing same-sex unions as an alternative to marriage, and inventing new, unacceptable notions of marriage to the point of accepting the adoption of children, are grave signs of dehumanization.”

An official Vatican statement on same-sex civil unions said, “The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. … Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity.”

In his famous November 4, 2000 address to the world's politicians, former Pope John Paul II said, “With regard to all laws which would do harm to the family, striking at its unity and its indissolubility, or which would give legal validity to a union between persons, including those of the same sex, who demand the same rights as the family founded upon marriage between a man and a woman, Christian legislators may neither contribute to the formulation of such a law nor approve it in parliamentary assembly.”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Gay Civil Unions “Grave Signs of Dehumanization” Says Vatican Cardinal Trujillo
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/nov/04113007.html
National Pro-Life Organization Warns Homosexual 'Civil Unions' Little Different than Granting 'Marriage' to Same-Sex Couples
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/aug/03082101.html
Catholic Group Wonders "Why the Compromise on Homosexual Civil Unions?"
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/sep/03090801.html
Don’t Waste Your Time Thinking about ‘Civil Unions’ Says Prominent Defender of Marriage
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/feb/05021507.html

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