Making homosexual relations equivalent to marriage is much more grave

(23) The truth about conjugal love also makes it possible to understand the serious social consequences of the institutionalization of homosexual relations: “We can also see how incongruous is the demand to grant ‘marital’ status to unions between persons of the same sex.  It is opposed, first of all, by the objective impossibility of making the partnership fruitful through the transmission of life according to the plan inscribed by God in the very structure of the human being.  Another obstacle is the absence of the conditions for that interpersonal complementarity between male and female willed by the Creator at both the physical-biological and the eminently psychological levels”.[39][39]  Marriage cannot be reduced to a condition similar to that of a homosexual relationship: this is contrary to common sense.[40][40] In the case of homosexual relations, which demand to be considered de facto unions, the moral and juridical consequences take on special relevance.[41][41] “Lastly, ‘de facto unions’ between homosexuals are a deplorable distortion of what should be a communion of love and life between a man and a woman in a reciprocal gift open to life”.[42][42]  However, the presumption to make these unions equivalent to “legal marriage”, as some recent initiatives attempt to do, is even more serious.[43][43]  Furthermore, the attempts to legalize the adoption of children by homosexual couples adds an element of great danger to all the previous ones.[44][44]  “The bond between two men or two women cannot constitute a real family and much less can the right be attributed to that union to adopt children without a family”.[45][45] To recall the social transcendence of the truth about conjugal love and consequently the grave error of recognizing or even making homosexual relations equivalent to marriage does not presume to discriminate against these persons in any way.  It is the common good of society which requires the laws to recognize, favor and protect the marital union as the basis of the family which would be damaged in this way.[46][46]