RELIGIOUS HOMOPHOBIA AND MARRIAGE RIGHTS IN MEXICO CITY

As I wrote a long time ago, almost always, whenever I've contended with professing "Christian" homophobes, once each of their points seeking to justify discrimination against LGBT people was successfully refuted, and they had no further rationalizations for their homophobia to present, their gloves came off and their vitriol was anything but "Christian."

Notice Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez' hatred in the cited article when he calls Gay men "faggots!" And there are professing "Christians," clergy, and even someone like him who was elevated to the rank of Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, who seem to feel no compunction against using such hateful epithets and in advocating discrimination against Gay people; in this Cardinal's case, even going so far as to assert bribery as contributing to the Court's righteous decision.

Whether it's in Mexico City, California, most of the United States, many parts of Africa, or anywhere else in the world where LGBT people are demonized, discriminated against, viewed as second-class citizens, and even imprisoned and executed, it must be asked why so many professing Christians and clergy are not loudly speaking out against the bearing of false witness and downright discrimination against Gay people done "in the name of God" or for any other reason.

How is it possible for anyone who calls him/herself a disciple of Christ, a disciple of the One Who commanded us to love and not judge others, to call him/herself a "Christian" and yet affirm prejudice and discrimination that leads to the untold suffering of countless LGBT people?

The fact is that there are thugs who call themselves Christians, and are given tacit, if not explicit, permission to manifest that thuggery by all too many denominations and congregations, all the while falsely appealing to the Bible and to God to justify their hateful prejudices.

Indeed, what has gone a long way in having many intelligent, decent, and sensitive people not even consider Christianity as a viable way in which to navigate their lives, have been the thugs, as well as the silent, cowardly, people within most of the institutional Church, who have been in the vanguard of denigrating LGBT people by seeking to deprive them of the dignity and civil rights that heterosexuals enjoy both within the institutional Church as well as in civil society.

And it has been the thugs who profess to be "Christians" who have the temerity to seek to impose their own prejudices and flawed biblical interpretations upon civil society, and who rail against those who demand equal rights for all of God's children!

It must be hammered home in any and every venue possible that no disciple of Christ can explicitly or tacitly countenance discrimination against LGBT people for to do so disqualifies them from calling themselves "Christians!"

In this connection, the following is an excerpt from an article that appeared yesterday regarding same-sex marriage rights in Mexico City, an article that I hope you read in its entirety:

Reporting from Mexico City — Gays in Mexico's capital today can marry and adopt children, broad rights that go beyond anything offered in much of the world and enshrined now by a remarkable series of rulings by the nation's Supreme Court....

As gay marriage languishes in California, the state's law in limbo, the Mexican Supreme Court voted overwhelmingly this month to uphold the capital's same-sex marriage statute as constitutional; to require such unions to be recognized across the nation; and to permit gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.

The court hewed to Mexico's strict separation of church and state and said the constitution did not indicate that marriage had to be defined as the union of a man and woman. To deny gay couples the right to adopt, the court said, would amount to discrimination....

The fiercest resistance to same-sex marriage has come from the influential Catholic Church.

Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez, archbishop of Guadalajara and one of the most senior prelates in the nation, in recent days made especially harsh comments widely seen here as offensive. His statement set off a firestorm in a country where, by law, the church is not supposed to get involved in politics.

Calling same-sex unions an "aberration," he said, "Would you want to be adopted by a pair of faggots or lesbians?"

He went on to accuse Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, of bribing the justices to force them to go along with gay marriage.

[For the full article, see here.]

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