While traveling in Mexico, two Vatican
prelates have criticized Mexico City's new gay marriage law.
The marriages of gay and lesbian
couples are an imitation, the bishops said, Mexico's El Universal
reported.
“A gay relationship is like
decaffeinated coffee, you do not wake up,” Father Gonzalo Miranda,
a bioethics professor at Regina Apostolorum University, a pontifical
university, said.
Miranda, along with Monsignor Elio
Sgreccia, president emeritus of the Pontification Academy for Life in
the Vatican, are in Mexico participating in a series of academic
conferences commemorating the 20th anniversary of the
founding of the School of Bioethics at the Universidad Anahuac in
Huixquilucan state. The bishops criticized Mexico City's new law at
a press conference held on Wednesday.
“What just happened in California is
very significant,” Miranda said, referring to a recent federal
judge's ruling that overturned the state's gay marriage law,
Proposition 8. “On two occasions people spoke out against the
legal recognition of gay marriage and twice a judge changed the
popular vote with a ruling. In Mexico, I don't know well the
mechanism used, but the people were not consulted, there's wasn't a
referendum either.”
In December, Mexico City became the
first autonomous municipality in Latin America to approve a gay
marriage law. The conservative federal government challenged the
law, but the
nation's Supreme Court declared the law, which, for the first time,
also allows gay couples to adopt, constitutional, and ruled that
all Mexican states must recognize the gay marriages of the nation's
capital.
Both prelates said such unions go
against nature, and that gay couples adopting children cannot be
considered parenthood “but a substitute that can harm the child, a
grave injustice that cannot be described.”