Gay-rights activists lament the acquittal of a homophobic Greek bishop

IN MANY parts of Europe, socially conservative religious leaders complain that they cannot express their faiths’ traditional teaching on homosexuality without running the risk of prosecution under equality or hate-crime legislation.

They cite the case of Ake Green, a Swedish Pentecostalist pastor who was sentenced to a month in jail, later overturned on appeal, after he called homosexuality a “tumour” on society. In Britain, police went through the early stages of a criminal investigation after Sir Iqbal Sacranie, a prominent Muslim leader, called homosexuality “not acceptable” and “harmful”. In 2016, a Christian street preacher in the Scottish town of Irvine spent a night in a police cell, but was later acquitted of all charges, after getting into an argument with a young man about the implication of the Genesis story for sexual behaviour.

In Greece, however, things seem to be moving in the other direction. To the intense dismay of secular human-rights campaigners and gay-rights activists, a famously sharp-tongued bishop has just been acquitted on charges of stirring up hatred and prejudice. The charges were prompted by an internet posting in 2015, when Greece’s parliament was in the process of giving legal status to same-sex unions. Among other things, Metropolitan Amvrosios of Kalavryta wrote:

Do not go near them! Do not listen to them! Do not trust them! They are the damned members of society! It is impermissible for some disgraced members of society to defend publicly the passions that touch their souls…Spit on those disgraced people, renounce them! They are monstrosities of nature! They are psychically and spiritually unwell! They are people with a mental disturbance…They are three times worse, and more dangerous, than those who live in mental asylums.     

In a tense hearing lasting nearly nine hours in the small town of Aigion, leading Greek human-rights campaigners and academics gave evidence for the prosecution. Nikos Alivizatos, a constitutional-law professor, said the bishop’s vocabulary was “the language of Hitler…[the language] we encounter in a regime of ayatollahs…” He said the bishop had brought embarrassment to Greece with his extreme positions, for example by saying that non-religious marriage was the moral equivalent of prostitution. 

The prosecution was brought at the behest of eight leading gay-rights activists, who testified that the bishop’s attack had compounded their feelings of insecurity and social exclusion.

The bishop himself seemed little concerned by perceptions of bigotry or intemperance. At one point during the hearing he said: “Spitting on them is the least of it, if I had a gun and I was permitted by the law, I would use it and we would finish things off.” He described fellow bishops who had spoken in somewhat more charitable terms about gay people as “betrayers of Orthodoxy”. 

But the bishop’s defence team, in between making some anti-gay jibes at the witnesses, insisted that comments by their client that seemed to attack gay people were in fact directed at the politicians who were voting for civil partnerships. 

This rather flimsy line of argument was accepted, and a representative of the state prosecution service urged acquittal. The recommendation was followed.

The dismay over the affair went beyond Greece. Another Orthodox bishop called Amvrosios, recently retired from the diocese of Helsinki, said he found it “shocking” to hear of his fellow hierarch’s outburst. The Finnish cleric told Erasmus that the Greek prelate’s “opinions contradict the church’s idealistic view of humanity. In the Orthodox Christian understanding, every human being has been made in the image of God, both gays and heterosexuals, male and female.”