Following huge gains at the polls in the United States last week, the Vatican began a campaign blitz against same-sex marriage this weekend.
It even went so far as comparing it to polygamy.
According to Reuters, Father Federico Lombardi said in a Vatican Radio address, "It is clear that in Western countries there is a widespread tendency to modify the classic vision of marriage between a man and woman, or rather to try to give it up, erasing its specific and privileged legal recognition compared to other forms of union."
Lombardi was obviously referring to voters in Maryland, Maine, and Washington on Tuesday approving their respective state's initiatives on same-sex marriage.
"Monogamous marriage between a man and woman is an achievement of civilization," Lombardi said. "If not, why not contemplate also freely chosen polygamy and, of course, not to discriminate, polyandry?"
He also said children should have the right to have a father and a mother.
Coincident with Lombardi's address, a front-page article in Saturday’s Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the Holy See - the universal government of the Vatican - also pushed back on same-sex marriage framing itself as the lone voice of courage against legal recognition of the practice.
“One might say the church, at least on this front, has been defeated,” L’Osservatore Romano observed. “But that’s not the case.”
According to the Associated Press, the article "insisted that Catholics were putting up a valiant fight to uphold church teaching in the face of 'politically correct ideologies invading every culture of the world' that are backed by institutions like the United Nations, which last year passed a non-binding resolution condemning anti-gay discrimination."
“The church is called to present itself as the lone critic of modernity, the only check ... to the breakup of the anthropological structures on which human society was founded,” the article said.
