The Catholic Church's Teaching about Same-Sex Marriage
AbstractAlthough the Church teaches respect for homosexual persons in their essential humanity and their basic human rights, this does not and cannot mean the approval of homosexual behavior or the legal recognition of homosexual unions. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself.