The surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XV1 has been welcomed by the UK gay Humanist charity the Pink Triangle.
The PTT secretary George Broadhead, said:
“I hope that all rational-thinking LGBT people will welcome the resignation. This pope has shown himself to be completely paranoid about homosexuality and his opposition to LGBT rights has known no bounds.
“Referring to the UK’s commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society before his visit to the UK in 2010, the Pope said: ‘The effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.’ At the time I described this as a thinly veiled attack on the anti-discrimination legislation concerning LGBT people. His claim that our equality laws undermine religious freedom suggests that he supports the right of churches to discriminate in accordance with their religious ethos. He seems to be defending discrimination by religious institutions and demanding that they should be above the law.
”He has frequently spoken out strongly against gay marriage, making his first attack in 2005 when he told a meeting of the Diocese of Rome that same-sex unions are only ‘pseudo-marriage’ born of ‘an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man’. In his 2008 Christmas message he declared bizarrely that saving humanity from homosexual behaviour was as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. In an address to the faithful in Portugal, he described gay marriage as an insidious and dangerous threat to the common good.
“In his message for World Day of Peace in January 2013, he said same-sex marriage is unnatural and poses a threat to ‘justice and peace’. He said: ‘There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union. Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.
“He has acquired a well-deserved reputation as one of the nastiest homophobic world leaders on a par with Mahmoud Ahmadinejadd of Iran and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, himself a Roman Catholic.”
Following the banning by Brighton and Hove Council of Vince Laws iconic living poem This Pope is Pants from the Jubilee Library last week, a Vatican spokesperson refused to comment when asked if this was the reason for the Popes resignation.
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