BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, December 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Slovakia’s Catholic bishops warned that an international convention on violence against women promotes gender ideology and urged their government not to approve the agreement.
Certain sections of the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence separate gender from biological sex, the bishops say, suggesting that children are born as “gender neutral,” with elements such as masculinity being the product of personal choice or education.
“Such assumptions, however, contradict human experience and common sense,” Bratislava Archbishop Stanislav Zvolensky said in a statement from the Slovakian Bishops Conference.
The bishops also warned that the Church or other agencies “that have long been established in protection of women are going to face direct discrimination” if they do not go along with the ideological gender definitions in the Convention document.
For example, one article of the Convention mentions equality issues “between men, women and non-stereotyped gender roles.”
“The Convention fights against gender stereotypes,” Archbishop Zvolensky said, “but the instruments of this fight can be easily misapplied. They can lead to the suppression of those non-governmental organizations and churches that disagree with the gender ideology.”
The Convention is made up of 81 articles, Vatican Radio reports, covering such topics as female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and forced abortion and sterilization, and it labels violence against women as a historical inequality of the sexes.
The Slovakian bishops expressed the importance of protecting women while at the same time condemning the veiled effort to push gender ideology in the Convention.
“Any form of violence committed on women is condemnable and absolutely inadmissible,” Archbishop Zvolensky said. “Violence against women can never be tolerated and it is our duty to make every effort to stop it.
“The protection of women, however, is an important matter,” he continued, “that all concealed attempts of simultaneously advocating for other issues, such as the gender ideology or teaching of so-called non-stereotypical roles in schools, are unacceptable.”