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Vatican Attacked for Defending Natural Family

By Hilary White, Rome Correspondent

ROME, December 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Vatican has been attacked for its defence of the natural family and of the countries in which the natural family is still recognised and protected in law. Homosexualist groups and newspaper editorials today attacked the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations, after he said that the Vatican will not support a resolution that purports to “decriminalise” homosexuality.

The proposal, put forward by France, is set to be brought to the European Union later this month. While the Vatican, an independent state, is not a part of the EU, it holds Permanent Observer status at the UN.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s representative at the UN, said that the proposal could lead to reverse discrimination against countries that only recognise natural marriage between a man and a woman. “Countries that don't recognize the union between people of the same sex as marriage will be punished and pressured.”

Archbishop Migliore told the French news agency I.Media that the proposal is “sad and outrageous” and was a form of “modern savagery that will dismantle our society from the inside out.”

“If adopted, they would create new and implacable discriminations,” Migliore said. “For example, states which do not recognise same-sex unions as 'matrimony' will be pilloried and made an object of pressure.”

Migliore’s message was underscored by the lack of interest for the resolution, with only about 50 countries out of the 192-member General Assembly offering to support it.

An editorial in Italy’s La Stampa newspaper, however, called the Vatican’s reasoning “grotesque” and accused the Church of supporting the death penalty, which is still levied against homosexuals in some Islamic countries. La Stampa accused the Vatican of fearing a “chain reaction in favour of legally recognised homosexual unions in countries, like Italy, where there is currently no legislation.”

Franco Grillini, founder and honorary president of Arcigay, Italy’s leading homosexualist political lobby group, said the Vatican’s position was “total idiocy and madness.”

Homosexualist groups were quick to react with protests. ANSA news agency rushed to cover the appearance of about 20 activists protesting today in Genoa. They unfurled a banner reading “The Vatican is an accomplice in our martyrdom,” ANSA reported. The Italian Communist daily newspaper, Liberazione, invited protestors to take their grievance directly to the Vatican, saying that protestors could attend the Pope's weekly Sunday address in St Peter's Square “wearing pink, a shirt or something else.”

Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, responded saying, “Obviously no one wants to defend the death penalty for homosexuals, as some would insinuate.”

“The well-known principles of respect for the fundamental rights of the person and the rejection of all unjust discrimination -- recognized clearly by the Catechism of the Catholic Church itself -- evidently exclude not only the death penalty, but all violent or discriminatory penal legislations in relation to homosexuals,” Lombardi said.

But, Lombardi continued, the proposed UN resolution from France does not seek solely the "decriminalization of homosexuality."

Rather, “it introduces a declaration of political value that could result in systems of control, according to which, every norm -- not only legal, but also related to the life of social or religious groups -- which does not place every sexual orientation on exactly the same level could be considered as contrary to respect of human rights.

“This could clearly become an instrument of pressure or discrimination against those who, just to put a very clear example, consider marriage between a man and a woman to be the fundamental and original form of social life, and as such, [believe] that it should have a privileged place.”

Pro-life and pro-family leaders have warned that the use of the language of “human rights” and “equality” have been manipulated by the homosexualist political movement and their secularist supporters to suppress principled opposition to the movement’s anti-Christian goals.

Gabrielle Kuby, a German Catholic writer, wrote recently in an article featured on LifeSiteNews.com, that the movement is a direct attack on the social foundations of western society. “Behind the facade” of equality, she wrote, “lurks the general attack on the moral standards to which we owe the Western culture. Without it, neither the family nor Christianity can survive.”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

“Gender Mainstreaming”: A Silent Revolution Dismantling Civilization
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/08112504.html

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