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Gay News: 200 gay couples in Barcelona staged a mass kiss-in on Sunday to protest against the Churchs views on homosexuality.
By: Nigel Robinson
200 couples joined the kiss-in
200 couples joined the kiss-in
Gay Barcelona welcomes the Pope with a kiss
8 November 2010
The protest was organised by a Facebook group called Queer Kissing Flashmob, and took place as the Pope was driven in his motorcade through the streets of Barcelona, on his way to consecrate the La Sagrada Familia basilica.
“We are here for a peaceful protest,” one of the participants in the kiss-in told the Irish Times.
“The Church oppresses us and doesn’t respect us… We can’t tolerate this sort of Pope in the twenty-first century.”
As well as gay protestors, the Pope was also greeted by five hundred feminists, attacking the Church’s stance on birth control and the position of women within the Church.
They carried banners which bore slogans such as “The woman decides to be a mother” and “Condoms save, the Pope damns”.
In his address to the congregation at La Sagrada Familia, the Pope criticised abortion and same-sex marriages and said that “the generous and indissoluble love of a man and a woman is the effective context and foundation of human life in its gestation, birth, growth and natural end.”
Gay marriage is legal in Spain, and Prime Minister José Rodriguez Zapatero, who oversaw its legalisation, was not present at the service.
