Cardinal compares gay marriage to Nazism

Gay rights groups in Spain reacted with anger on Wednesday after a Roman Catholic cardinal compared obedience to the legalization of same-sex marriage to the process that led to the creation of Nazi death camps, Agence France-Presse reports. "If you give obedience to the law priority over obedience to your conscience, that leads to Auschwitz," Cardinal Ricard Maria Carles, former archbishop of Barcelona, told a Spanish television station. Spanish deputies last week approved a bill allowing gays and lesbians to marry and adopt children. The bill is expected to become law and would make Spain the third European country after the Netherlands and Belgium to do so. "The people who made Auschwitz were not criminals, but people who had been forced to, or thought they had a duty to, obey the laws of the Nazi government rather than their own conscience." The Triangulo foundation, a Spanish gay rights group, said that comparison with the Holocaust was "repugnant" and called on the church to "stop sowing hatred against victims of discrimination and against victims of the Holocaust, among whom there were many homosexuals." Another gay rights group, Cogam, said it was "incredible that the Catholic hierarchy should reach the point where it makes a link between the parliamentarians who voted for the [gay marriage bill] and Nazism" and attacked an "unacceptable interference by a foreign state in Spanish politics." The Vatican, in the person of Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, last week called on Spanish public service workers to show "conscientious objection" to the new legislation. Justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said that such an objection had no place in a law voted by the parliament. A large number of mayors and municipal councilors said this week they would not conduct marriage services for same-sex couples. But many conservative mayors of big cities, among them Alberto Ruiz Gallardon of Madrid and Rita Barbera of Valencia, said they would respect the law.