On a recent edition of CNNH’s “Joy Behar Show,” homosexual activist Michelangelo Signorile said the following: “You have this pope saying that homosexuality is the end of civilization. That we have to protect the culture from homosexuality the way we have to protect the rainforest from degradation. You know, we’ve got a bishop in Guam who just said that gays are worse than the Islamic fundamentalists.” To which Behar said, “Oh, my God.”
None of what Signorile said is true. Not only has the pope never said that homosexuality is the “end of civilization,” a Lexis-Nexis search shows that he has never even used that term.
Regarding the comment on homosexuality and the rainforest, here is exactly what the pope said in December 2008: “That which has come to be expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’ effectively results in man’s self-emancipation from Creation (nature) and from the Creator. Man wants to do everything by himself and to decide always and exclusively about anything that concerns him personally. But this is to live against truth, to live against the Spirit Creator. The tropical rainforests deserve our protection, yes, but man does not deserve it less as a Creature of the Spirit himself, in whom is inscribed a message that does not mean a contradiction of human freedom but its condition.”
Nowhere is homosexuality mentioned, never mind the spin Signorile put on it.
Last October, Guam Archbishop Anthony Apuron said that “Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior by death.” But he did not sanction such measures. Indeed, he unequivocally condemned them. “Terrorism as a way to oppose the degeneration of the culture is to be rejected completely since such violence is itself another form of degeneracy.” So Signorile again twisted what was actually said.
Common decency suggests that a retraction be made. But Signorile never offered one.
