ROME, January 29, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Archbishop Fernando Sebastián Aguilar is under fire from a Spanish homosexualist group who have launched legal action against him for comments that it is “not an insult” to say that homosexuality is a psychological disorder.
The Archbishop, a retired theologian who was recently named as one of Pope Francis’ new batch of cardinals-elect, was blasted by the international press when he told a Spanish newspaper last week, “Homosexuality is a defective manner of expressing sexuality, because [sex] has a structure and a purpose, which is procreation.”
“A homosexual who can’t achieve procreation is failing,” he said. “Our bodies have many defects. I have high blood pressure, a defect I have to try and correct in whatever way I can.”
“To say that homosexuality is a defect is not an insult,” he added. “It helps because in many cases of homosexuality it is possible to recover and become normal with the right treatment.”
One of Spain’s leading homosexulist groups, Colegas, at first responded with a statement inviting Sebastián to a meeting “to know firsthand our concerns and problems, and that such statements can only be the result of ignorance and misinformation.”
“Statements like yours only cause pain and suffering to many believers,” the group added. “Your attitude can ‘normalize’ this ‘treatment’ of information, proximity and tolerance that we recommend.”
Now Colegas has filed a complaint with authorities against the cardinal-elect, saying he has broken article 510 of Spain’s penal code, which allows for fines and jail terms of up to three years for inciting “to hatred and violence”.
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“Spain is a modern country and a secular one, and these types of declarations from the church have to be punished because they [members of the church] are the least qualified to talk about sexual deficiencies, above all because they have hidden cases of child abuse and paedophilia,” Colegas president Antonio Ferre said after filing the complaint.
The homosexualist movement lobbied hard in the late sixties, at the height of the sexual revolution, to have homosexuality removed from psychiatric diagnostic manuals. This goal was accomplished in 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) became the first to remove it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II). Since then, activists in the movement have used their success to good effect in many jurisdictions.
In 2009, Colegas made a similar threat against Professor Gloria Maria Tomas of the Catholic University of Murcia, who told a conference audience that homosexuality is “intrinsically disordered” and that it was only removed from the lists of psychological pathologies after political pressure from gay lobbyists.
In Britain and Ireland, activists are putting pressure on Christian psychotherapists who maintain that people with unwanted same-sex attraction have the right to seek therapy. Therapists in the UK have faced being “struck off” from their professional accreditation bodies, a result that makes it nearly impossible for them to practice.