” “To avoid recognising gay marriages, some Western countries including 30 states of the USA, Australia, Latvia, Canada, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador are "armour-plating" their legislations: it was announced by Rafael Navarro Valls, law professor at the Complutense University in Madrid, as he spoke today at the theological-pastoral congress which is in progress now in Valencia, for the V World Family Meeting (1-9 July). Navarro Valls mentioned the predictions made by some sociologists according to whom the legalisation of gay marriages in some countries will have "a knock-on effect" in other states. In his opinion, instead, what happened is an "armour plating", with many countries amending their legislations, sometimes even their Constitution, as it happened in Latvia, "to prevent such marriages". Yesterday, during the congress, cardinal Juliàn Herranz, president of the Papal Council for Acts of Law, also asked the legislators to recognise marriage as "the union of a man and a woman open to procreation". Mgr. Herranz recalled that marriage between heterosexuals "is not a postulate of the Church" but a "two-thousand-year-long tradition of the Greco-Roman culture" and an "anthropological reality". Tomorrow morning, cardinal Stanislaw Dziwiscz, archbishop of Cracow, will take the floor.” “
