The Spanish Catholic Bishops’ Conference has blasted a proposed law on gender equality as reductive, arbitrary, and dangerous.
The aim of the law according to the text itself is to develop and guarantee the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people “by eradicating situations of discrimination, to ensure that in Spain sexual orientation, sexual identity, gender expression, sexual characteristics and family diversity can be lived with full freedom.”
To this end, the new legislation would guarantee the right of persons to compete in athletic activities according to the gender they identify with rather than their biological sex, the right for same-sex couples to adopt children, and access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for boys and girls experiencing gender dysphoria, among other things.
In its Oct. 10 statement, the bishops’ Committee for Family and the Defense of Life declares that the Church “has the mission in this world to defend and show the dignity of each human person, created in the image and likeness of God, and to raise her voice prophetically when this dignity is threatened in different ways.”
In recent months, the text states, “legislative initiatives have been initiated that, far from promoting the good of the person and their dignity, seriously undermine it.”
The proposed legislation on LGBTI rights and gender equality contains “really worrisome elements of the imposition of queer theory,” the document continues, “a theory that radically questions the sexual identity of people, in all areas of personal, family and social life, arbitrarily establishing and imposing a single anthropological conception.”
Citing Pope Francis, the bishops note that gender ideology is “one of the greatest attacks of our days against human dignity and, perhaps, the greatest threat existing against the family.”
There are many testimonies of families, parents, young people, and adolescents who have “suffered the consequences produced by the so-called queer theory or gender theory,” the bishops note. “To all of them we want to show our support and help and extend our hand to illuminate the perversion of an ideological legislation.”
A law promoting gender ideology is highly problematic, they insist, because a democratic state “cannot impose a peculiar and reduced anthropological vision in all areas: educational, legal, health, labor, in the media, in culture, sports and leisure.”
The bishops also point out that there has been a considerable increase in the number of adolescents who ask to change sex without presenting an authentic gender dysphoria, but rather as “a manifestation of affective instabilities typical of that age.”
Scientific studies, moreover, show that more than 70 percent of children who ask to change their sex do not persist in desire once they pass adolescence, they observe.
Establishing a “right” to request and receive medical and even surgical treatment and forcing health personnel to obey the wishes of patients even when it entails serious risks for the person is “a clear example of irrational ideological dogmatism,” the bishops assert.
Additionally, the new law would effectively eliminate the possibility of psychosexual treatment for those with a gender identity disorder, since this would imply treating the condition as a pathology, they note.
Freedom of conscience “must be respected for all professionals in the various spheres of social life,” they write, without imposing “an indoctrination that conditions professional performance in the educational, health, civil service, judiciary, culture, media fields.”