News

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, Latin America Correspondent

MEXICO CITY, December 23, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “Homosexual marriage” and gay adoption received approval from lawmakers in Mexico's capital on Monday, in a 39-25 vote with five abstentions.

Opposition lawmakers immediately sent a letter to the city's governor Marcelo Ebrard, asking him to veto the legislation, and announced plans to launch a constitutional challenge in the nation's Supreme Court.

The measure is supported by the socialist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and Labor Party (PT), which dominate the government of Mexico City, despite their unpopularity in most of the rest of the country.

The new legislation is opposed by a coalition of opposition lawmakers from the conservative National Action Party (PAN), liberal Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the environmentalist Green Ecologist Party. The opposition deputies have delivered a letter to Marcelo Ebrard asking him not to sign the law.

“We are waiting for a response from the capital city's leader as soon as possible, to take advantage of this Christmas season to see a chief of government who protects the respect for the rights of our children in the capital.  We are already working on a case for unconstitutionality to present to the Supreme Court,” said Mariana Gómez del Campo, the PAN's coordinator for Mexico City deputies.

Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, archbishop of Mexico City, denounced the legislation as “perverse and immoral” and warned that it would “lead the society inevitably to ruin.”

In marriage, said Rivera, “Christians don't only obey a form of social organization, but rather an order instituted by God since the creation of the world, and there cannot be any human law over this divine will that rules conjugal morality.  Such a presentation is nothing more than arrogance, and will lead society inevitably to ruin, something that deeply concerns us.”

Rivera also strongly rejected the adoption of children by homosexual couples as “inadmissible.”

“Our children and young people are running a very serious risk of seeing as normal this type of union, and can falsely understand sexual differences as just a type of personality, ceasing to appreciate the duality of human sexuality, which is a condition of procreation and, therefore, of the conservation and development of mankind,” he said.

Mexico City's homosexualist measures are the latest in a string of anti-family and anti-life legislation passed in recent years by the government of the Federal District, which have included abortion-on-demand free of charge during the first 15 weeks of pregnancy in government hospitals, express divorce, and homosexual “civil unions.”

The city also publishes a homosexualist book for use in the city's schools that portrays homosexual behavior as natural and normal.

Mexicans outside of the capital are generally opposed to the city's anti-family legislation, and 17 states have responded with constitutional amendments protecting the right to life since the approval of abortion in Mexico City in 2007, which has resulted in tens of thousands of abortions.