The Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives issued a declaration Wednesday calling for the recognition of all sexual proclivities and acts as “part of the natural order.”
The UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) financed a conference Wednesday to launch of the Global Interfaith Commission on LGBT+ Lives, Pink News reported.
Clergy and laypersons hailing from a number of different religious traditions signed the group’s inaugural declaration affirming the preciousness of “all sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions”
The declaration denounces religious teachings that suggest that all sexual attractions and activities are not of the same worth or that condemn homosexual acts as immoral and foreign to God’s plan for humanity.
“We recognise with sadness that certain religious teachings have often, throughout the ages, caused and continue to cause deep pain and offense to those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex,” the text reads.
The Catholic Church, for instance, teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and can never be approved.
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. “They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”
The Catholic Church also rejects the claim that all sexual acts are of equal value, insisting that human sexuality “is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman.”
In Wednesday’s declaration, the Global Interfaith Commission calls for a ban on conversion therapy even to those who specifically request it, asserting that helping people who are unhappy with their sexual attractions is a “harmful practice.”
“We call for all attempts to change, suppress or erase a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression – commonly known as “conversion therapy” — to end, and for these harmful practices to be banned,” the text states.
Among the signers of the declaration are a leader of the Black Lives Matters movement, several rabbis, a number of Anglican clergy and bishops, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Methodists, the former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and several Catholics including Jesuit Father George Williams, Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministries, and Marianne Duddy-Burke of DignityUSA.
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