Archbishop Jason Gordon says people attracted to the same sex should be accepted and respected, but gender ideology is a 'diabolical' social construct that is a lie and should not be supported by Christians.
With July being declared Pride Month in TT, Gordon spoke on the issue of Pride during an Ask the Archbishop live chat on Instagram on June 23, which was published by the Catholic News.
Gordon said Pride was based on two things. The first was a social justice issue of homosexual people being 'treated badly within church and society.'
He noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2358 said, 'They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfil God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter.'
He added that, Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners in the book of Matthew chapter 9, saying that the sick were the ones who needed doctors so he came to call sinners.
In this way he said Catholics should love the person and ensure they retain their full dignity as 'a child of God in need of God's grace and healing.' But they should also help the person understand why there actions were 'unnatural and sinful.'
Therefore Catholics were 'obligated' to work to end prejudice and uphold the dignity of every person.
'So, on the social justice side, we have to 100 per cent work towards an inclusive world where everyone is a child of God and where every child of God has a space, a place, and an identity, and is safe, and is being kept safe. On the other hand, Pride brings with it what I will call gender ideology and the multiple gender theory. And that's a little more complicated.'
Gordon said up to the 1990s the terms 'gender' and 'sex' were the same. There were separated from each other in a document created in preparation for the United Nations Cairo International Conference on Population and Development meeting in 1994. Therefore, it was socially constructed.
He quoted Genesis 1:27 which said God created mankind, male and female, in his own image.
'The divorce of these two has created an ideology-a system of ideas that is not necessarily rooted in reality. The reality is people have different sexual desires. But the reality is people were created male or female.'
He said the human body either had XY (male) or XX (female) chromosomes except for the intersexed.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, intersex people are those born with any variation in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones or genitals that do not fit the typical definitions for male or female bodies.
He said it did not matter what a person wanted to be, or how they changed their body parts, they still had chromosomes that indicated they were either male or female.
'Gender i
