Spanish court throws out ‘hate crime’ complaint against archbishop

Granada, Spain, Aug 10, 2017 / 12:37 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Spanish state prosecutor has dismissed a ‘hate crime’ complaint against the Archbishop of Granada after an LGBT activist group claimed he had preached hate against transgender people in a homily.

According to EFE news agency, the case was thrown out because the Granada prosecutor’s office could not find sufficient cause to bring legal action against Archbishop Francisco Javier Martínez of Granada.

In February, the activist group “Observatory against LGBT-phobia” filed a complaint against the archbishop, claiming that he “promoted hate speech against LGBT persons” in a homily in which he lamented the introduction of gender ideology to young children in school.

“There is a short-sightedness and lack of intelligence” in introducing this ideology to children, the archbishop said in his homily at the time.

“We are equal in dignity…but we are not interchangeable,” he said of biological differences between men and women.

In their complaint, the activist group asked the judge to prosecute the archbishop “in an express and exemplary way, in order to put an end to this unjust scourge of hate speech.”

The prosecution said the case was dismissed in part because of freedom of speech found in the Spanish constitution, according to EFE.

A similar complaint was filed against another archbishop in 2016, when feminist and LGBT activist groups accused Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, Archbishop of Valencia, of hate speech following a homily in which he warned of attacks against the family that came from “movements and actions of the gay lobby, ideologies such as radical feminism or the most insidious of all, gender ideology.”

A court in Valencia dismissed the case in September 2016, citing the cardinal’s freedom of speech.

 


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1 Comment

  1. This would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. And its clear the liberal faction in the US has been moving down this same road in recent years, a very dangerous trend. A trend which will be vastly accelerated if Biden holds the White House. Like the case of the baker who declined to bake the wedding cake for the gay couple, only much worse. The irrational crowd want you to believe that open is closed, and black is white, and up is down. More than that they want to encode this into law and persecute and jail those who have the nerve to disagree.Not long ago there would have been agreement with the medical community that most of these folks were mentally ill. As our society grows more “tolerant” of all things but religion, expect to see more of these distortions of reality.

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