NYT headline. You may think this sounds absurd, just a figment of the imagination of American liberals who somehow suddenly see this once-unknown issue as the centerpiece of civil rights, but:
Argentina was on the verge of approving gay marriage, and the Roman Catholic Church was desperate to stop that from happening. It would lead tens of thousands of its followers in protest on the streets of Buenos Aires and publicly condemn the proposed law, a direct threat to church teaching, as the work of the devil.
But behind the scenes, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who led the public charge against the measure, spoke out in a heated meeting of bishops in 2010 and advocated a highly unorthodox solution: that the church in Argentina support the idea of civil unions for gay couples....
Bergoglio revealed himself as "a deal maker willing to compromise and court opposing sides in the debate, detractors included." Where opposition wasn't going to stop gay marriage, the compromise of civil unions might. That was the thinking. Bergoglio "acted as both the public face of the opposition to the law and as a bridge-builder."
“He didn’t want the church to take a position of condemning people but rather of respect for their rights like any vulnerable person,” said [Roxana Alfieri, a social worker in the communications department of the bishops’ central office here] who sat in on the bishops’ 2010 meeting.
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