The setting up of a helpline offering assistance to homosexuals was announced recently. The national helpline, which has the support of Government and Opposition, will be manned by trained volunteers.

No doubt the inauguration of a service meant to provide psychological and other assitance to men and women with problems related to their sexuality is a step in the right direction. Gone are the days, thank God, when the very word homosexual was not even pronounced: when those with homosexual tendencies were ostracised and, sometimes even persecuted. Gradually society has come to accept that men and women with homosexual orientation are no criminals and have nothing to apologise for.

This tallies with the teaching of the Church, which states that those who are born with such an orientation are not morally responsible or guilty of any misdemeanour; they are not "living in sin", so to speak. However - and this is where the teaching of the Church and the views of liberals differ - the Church teaches that homosexual acts go against God's laws and hence cannot be condoned.

Sadly, many of those who have fought, rightly, to bring to an end centuries-old prejudices and intolerance, and have succeeded in convincing public opinion of the validity of their cause, have now gone further. They are insisting that gay unions are as valid as unions between men and women. They are claiming that they have as much right to "marry" as heterosexuals.

They have conveniently forgotten what marriage is all about. They are ignoring a fundamental truth that is as old as man and women, viz., that one of the principal aims of marriage is pro-creation. Indeed, up to not so long ago procreation was considered as the only aim of marriage.

How can the union between two of the same sex even be remotely considered a marriage? As the Archbishop primate of Spain, Cardinal Antonio Canizares Llovera, recently said in a homily: "It is not even valid to call by the name 'marriage' - stable union of one man and one woman for life - those homosexual unions because they disfigure at its very core what this word expresses and has always expressed in all areas of the world at all times."

The Archbishop was speaking following the desire expressed by Spanish government officials to legalise so-called homosexual marriages. "At a time when the protection of the family institution should have first place in the concern of governments of rich countries caught in the whirlwind of a demographic winter... the proposal of a homosexual marriage and the fact that political leaders assume it, demonstrate a grave disorder in the mentality of the prevailing culture," he added.

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