by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalisat
After the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez, announced publicly that he could prove that members of the Supreme Court were bribed by backers of homosexual marriage and adoption in order to gain their votes, the government is now threatening him with “punitive measures.”
According to LifeSiteNews.com, Cardinal Iñiguez made the bribery charges in a press conference last week while in the state of Aguascalientes. He accused both the governor of Mexico City and international pro-abortion groups of having “fed” the ministers with “gifts” in order to obtain the approval of homosexual “marriage” and adoption that was imposed on 31 Mexican states earlier this month. Cardinal Iniguez says he has “something specific” to back up his claims but will not divulge the details publicly. He said he intends to submit his information as evidence in court.
This revelation sparked fury among governmento officials, particularly the socialist governor of Mexico City, Marcel Ebrard, who responded by filing charges against the Cardinal. Ebrard claimed the charges were necessary to defend his honor and the principle of separation of church and state.
However, Antonio Gutiérrez Montaño, an Archdiocesan spokesman, was unconcerned about the charges and reassured the public that the archbishop would prove his charges if necessary.
“Mr. Ebrard has the liberty to proceed as he wishes,” said Gutiérrez Montaño to the Mexican newspaper Milenio, reportedly adding that if a lawsuit were filed, the cardinal would reveal the proof he has for his statement, and “will not retract nor apologize” for what he has said.
The Cardinal’s unflinching stance has galvanized the Catholic Church in Mexico. “We express our solidarity and our feelings to Cardinals Norberto Rivera Carrera and Juan Sandoval Iñiguez regarding this delicate topic,” the leaders of Mexico’s bishops’ conference wrote in a communiqué issued on Tuesday. “The bishops of Mexico, sensitive to the majority opinion not only in Mexico City, but in the whole country, express, in the exercise of the liberty of expression guaranteed by our democratic political regime, our total disagreement with the verdict issued by the SCJN [Suprema Corte de Justica de la Nación].”
They added: “We believe that equalizing these unions with the name of matrimony is a lack of respect, both for the very essence of marriage between a man and a woman, expressed in the Constitution of the country in its article 4, as well as the customs of the culture itself that has reigned over us for centuries.”
But this hasn’t stopped the government from trying to silence the Cardinal with threats that many are now calling a “new religious persecution.”
Hugo Valdemar, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, whose Archbishop Norberto Rivera also made strong statements condemning homosexual unions, called Ebrard’s threats “scandalous” and accused him of “using all of the force of the government, of the State, to go against the citizens.”
“It is worrisome that a government official who is subject to observation, scrutiny, and criticism by those he governs, cannot handle criticism and uses the whole apparatus of power to repress two citizens [Valdemar and Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez]. This was only done by dictators like Pinochet and Francisco Franco, but it is not done by a democratic government that boasts of being the city of liberty.”
The government is also coming after Valdemar for saying that Ebrard’s policies created laws that are destructive to the family and that caused worse damage than narcotrafficking. “Marcelo Ebrard and his party, the PRD, have endeavored to destroy us.”
Ebrard responded by filing a complaint against him for “moral damage,” but Valdemar dismissed the charge, saying he can prove his contention with Mexico City’s own statistics, which show that there have been 42,000 “murders of innocent children in the wombs of their own mothers,” while only 28,000 have died in the nation’s war against the drug lords.
“For that reason I said that his laws were pernicious, perverse, and do worse damage than organized crime. I don’t have anything more to demonstrate, that is what I affirm and maintain it using information from his (Ebrard’s) own government,” Valdemar said. He also stated that it is the Mexico City government that is the one causing “moral damage” to the society.
As for Cardinal Iniguez, he is not intimidated by the government’s persecution. “There is no fear from this threat,” said Archdiocesan spokesman Gutiérrez Montaño. “He [the cardinal] also has the right to exercise what he thinks he should do if any calumny is raised against him.”
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