« Statement by the Communication Service of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations on recent changes in family laws in France and Great Britain »

Same-sex unions have continued to be legalized in Europe. Recently, corresponding bills have been approved by the lower chambers of the French and British parliaments. It was done not only in defiance of the opinion of a part of the deputies but also against the background of mass protest demonstrations by citizens.

These legislative steps show that a revolution is taking place in European societies’ understanding of marriage as such. The legal recognition of homosexual unions and their equating to marriage is a radical change in the sphere of legislation regulating family relations including laws concerning taxation, education, healthcare, upbringing of children, etc.

The legalization of same-sex unions is another step towards giving an absolutely new meaning to marriage and the family directly opposite to the Christian one. Basically, this process involves connivance at individualism and hedonism on the scale of society and state and ultimately on the scale of the whole of humanity.

In the countries which have embarked on the path of a radical revision of traditional family ethics, this process has resulted in a demographic crisis which is growing from year to year. The revision of fundamental norms of family law on which the human community has been built for centuries and which are preserved as before in the moral code of major world religions is a path leading to the self-destruction of whole nations.

Legislation allowing homosexual unions to adopt and raise children appears especially dangerous. Evidently, these children will develop a view of parents, family and moral and social values completely different from the traditional ones. All this will contribute to further obliteration of differences between the sexes and subsequently to the forcing out from public consciousness the image of woman as mother, wife and guardian of the household. The final rejection of the idea that man and woman have special vocations and complement each other in family life threatens destructive consequences for both the individual and society.

The Russian Orthodox Church preserves and defends the original Christian understanding of marriage and family, sanctifies marital relations by the sacrament of Church marriage and asserts the importance of marriage for the wellbeing and development of society as a whole.

Our Church expresses her solidarity with Christians, adherents to other religions and those proponents of non-religious worldviews who have preserved the traditional understanding of marriage as a union of man and woman and come out against the attempts to use a radical legal reform to impose on the whole society a different understanding of marriage, one unprecedented in human history.

Aware of the danger of these processes, we believe it important to develop dialogue with all those elements of society, religious and non-religious, who support traditional ideas of family values. This criterion is one of the most important ones in the Russian Orthodox Church’s choice of partners in inter-Christian and interreligious dialogues.

DECR Communication Service