Juan Sandoval Íñiguez during an event in Jalisco in 2017. Fernando Carranza (CUARTOSCURO)
Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez's last message this Holy Week was not about love, spiritual reflection or hope.
The Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara has recorded a seven-minute video to launch an attack on the LGBT community and the civil authorities of the State of Jalisco after the approval last week of a package of reforms in favor of equal marriage, the recognition of trans identities and the prohibition of so-called "therapies" to "cure homosexuality".
“Gender ideology is an instrument of world domination,” the 89-year-old religious assured in a message titled “A bitter surprise”, full of ultra-conservative and conspiracy arguments.
Sandoval Íñiguez's speech had it all.
He called the deputies “vendepatrias” and “sexual deviants” the members of the sex-gender community.
He blamed billionaire George Soros for "imposing the new world order."
He warned of the arrival of "a state dictatorship" in Mexico.
And, incidentally, he spiced up his message with the denial of the pandemic, assuring that the coronavirus was "created" and "spread" by hidden powers that move the world's strings to "sell vaccines" and "scare people".
The cardinal not only minimized a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 320,000 Mexicans, if only the figures on the official mortality table are considered, he also entered the political arena unabashedly in a country where the separation between the Church and the State has been elevated to constitutional status for more than a century,
“It is a sad thing that these legislators, who do not represent the State of Jalisco, have approved something as serious, as harmful, as harmful in the long term as destroying marriage and equalizing marriage as God did, of man and woman, with that of the union of two people of the same sex”, commented Sandoval Íñiguez in the sermon, uploaded to his Facebook page this week.
The cardinal resigned from the archbishopric in 2011, but remains a powerful public figure in Jalisco, one of the traditionally most conservative areas of the country.
"They are weakening the peoples to reach the new order, world domination, with gender ideology and the other plagues that have come upon us, such as covid," he said about the modification of an article of the Civil Code,
which eliminates the requirement that marriage can only be celebrated between people of the opposite sex.
The religious has added that it seeks to "continue promoting homosexuality" and that homoparental adoption is to "ruin the creatures."
After protests from conservative groups, the state Congress approved fines of up to 28,866 pesos, just over $1,450, for anyone who promotes physical and psychological therapies to “correct” sexual orientation in the early hours of April 7.
The right of trans people to request new birth certificates was also guaranteed.
“Love is love and there is nothing to cure”, affirmed the governor, Enrique Alfaro, after the majority vote of 26 of 38 deputies.
Mexico City was the first state in the country to ban “conversion therapies” in 2019. “It is a huge aberration, an unbearable, tremendous state dictatorship,” lamented Sandoval Íñiguez, who has called the decision an “early bird” .
"The State is not the owner of the children, that is only in a communist regime, absolute", the priest pointed out about the prohibition of "conversion therapies", a practice classified as torture by the United Nations Organization.
It is a recurrent argument among ultraconservative groups, which defend that it is the parents' decision to isolate in spiritual retreats, apply physical punishment and subject non-heterosexual minors to psychological abuse.
"They approved that neither teachers nor religious people can redirect sexually deviant children, children and young people," he concluded.
The cardinal targeted "the destruction of the family", the slogan that hides the anti-rights mobilization and the lobbying in local Congresses to avoid reforms that by mandate of the Supreme Court should already be in the state codes.
"A society without a family is a manipulable society," Sandoval Íñiguez has said, "at the mercy of the whims of the rulers."
"Keep to the judgment of God", he has commented as a lesson to the local deputies.
"Even though the State has allowed abortion, that is not why it is allowed by God's law," he has warned the congregation and has threatened to excommunicate women who undergo abortion.
Despite the priest's statements and the unconstitutionality of the measure, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy is still a crime in the State and just in March, a woman obtained the first protection to do so without being criminalized.
The applicant is not pregnant, she did it herself precisely to protest against the ban.
In September, the Supreme Court decided that it was illegal to punish women who have abortions with jail time, but most states have not harmonized their local laws.
Sandoval Íñiguez has a long history of positions against the LGBT community and political proselytism, as well as statements without scientific basis.
He also accumulates scandals for covering up pederasts, embezzlement and money laundering, in accusations from which he has been spared.
In the June elections of last year, for example, he openly called for not voting for Morena to avoid the "communist, socialist enslaving" threat.
“The
chip
that they intend to put in the vaccine to keep you under control is the mark of the beast that the Apocalypse says,” he assured in a video that Facebook removed from its platform in January 2021 for spreading false news.
"They get on anyone, that's why they kill them," he said about the femicides in 2017. He is not a minister of minor worship screaming in his parish.
He is the same voice that was in charge of announcing each vote of the cardinals in the conclave that elected Pope Francis in 2013.
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