Workers’ Commissions have urged the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the Bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez, for his statements about the homosexuality when considering that “they can be typified as a hate crime”.
Specifically, the union refers to some demonstrations by the prelate to Canarian Television in which he warns that homosexuality is a mortal sin and compares it to alcoholism, words branded as “unacceptable” by the president of the community, Angel Victor Torres, which he has asked you to rectify.
Comisions Obreras recalls that this is not the first time that Bernardo Álvarez has made statements of this type, since on another occasion he defended in an interview that “there are minors who want abuse and even provoke you” and affirmed that “the phenomenon of homosexuality is something that harms people and society”.
“The repeated actions and statements of Bernardo Álvarez, Bishop of Tenerife, are totally unacceptable and they represent a frontal attack on effective equality, dignity and individual freedom, which are acquired and immovable human rights for all people. You cannot allow the rights of any person to be undermined, much less because of their sexual orientation,” he says.
The union maintains that the bishop’s statements, due to their repetition, “seriousness” and “infamous” nature, can be classified as a hate crime, for which it “calls on the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office to act accordingly.”
“Our society continues to advance in rights and equality and must continue along this path so that equality between people is real and effective in all areas and from CCOO we will continue working for it, facing the attempts of those who intend to impose their model heteropatriarchal and criminalizing people from the LGTBI community with total impunity,” he adds.
LGTBfobia Observatory believes that Álvarez’s words only cause pain
The director of the Madrid Observatory against LGTBphobia and head of International for the Federation of LGTB Organizations, Rubén López, considers that the words of the Bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez, only cause pain to believers.
In statements to Canarian Television, when asked if homosexuality is a sin, the bishop replied that “it depends on the person, on the circumstances”, and added that for something to be a mortal sin it is necessary to “be aware that it is, second, that he does it freely, and that he is not conditioned by anything”.
Rubén López, who is a volcanologist at the National Geographic Institute (IGN), assures in statements to Canarias Radio, collected by EFE, that these statements “do a lot of harm to many believing people and the only thing they do is harm.”
For this reason, he indicates that he fully rejects and condemns them because, he insists, the only thing they do is cause pain to those who believe.
Likewise, he admits that he is sad that “at this point” and “in the 21st century” these types of statements continue.
