SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Jan. 30. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Parliamentary Group Sí Podemos Canarias has asked the parties of the ‘Pacto de las flores’ that supports the regional government – PSOE, NC and ASG, in addition to the purple formation itself – not to invite the Bishop of Tenerife, Bernardo Álvarez , to any institutional act on the islands “because of his repeated homophobia”.
In a statement, the parliamentary group has indicated that this request is based on Álvarez’s latest statements during an interview on Televisión Canaria “in which he equates homosexuality to a disease such as alcoholism.”
For the party, these words violate article 14 of the Spanish Constitution, which establishes the equality of all people before the law, without any discrimination prevailing due to any personal or social condition or circumstance.
In this regard, the president of the Sí Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group, María del Río, said that the bishop’s statements “are not only a repeated display of homophobia that outrages all of Canarian society, but also attack our democratic values and the rights of LGBTI people, causing added suffering and harm to those who, being believers, have a different sexual orientation or gender identity”.
Similarly, he recalled that the current bishop of the Diocese of Nivariense already in 2007 expressed in another interview for the newspaper ‘La Opinion de Tenerife’ that “homosexuality harms people and society”, also justifying the sexual abuse of minors because “there are adolescents who are minors and they are perfectly in agreement and, furthermore, wanting it. Even if you are not careful, they provoke you”.
However, Sí Podemos Canarias has understood that the bishop’s statement in which he apologized “does nothing more than aggravate the situation”, since, far from retracting his words, “he limits himself to writing a few general lines of his own of a homily or religious writing than of an act of compensation for offenses in the civil or social order”.
