Protest greets Catholic stance against gay marriage

Members of El Salvador’s gay community hang a rainbow flag bearing the words ‘Priests paedophiles’ in Spanish outside the Legislative Assembly in San Salvador on Monday, April 20, 2009 to protest the Catholic Church’s request to legally prohibit marriages between gays.

The action is a response to the Church’s claim to have amassed 200,000 signatures on a petition in support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, which is currently before the legislature.

“The basic unit of society is the family, and consequently so is marriage, and therefore it deserves a true constitutional definition,” the Archbishop of San Salvador, Jose Luis Escobar, said at a press conference on Sunday.

He went on to say same-sex marriages “are not moral and therefore cannot be considered marriage, but in fact are [unions], but that’s another thing,” the website SDPNoticias.com reports

Source: http://www.mcv.e-p.net.au