“Autumn Love”

AI generated image by Jamie Arpin-Ricci*

Your Eminence, Metropolitan Antonios, Patriarchal Vicar for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America,

In your recent essay entitled Holiness at a Time When Uncleanness is Made Legal, you wrote with harsh condemnation about a number of cultural currents in contemporary societies around the planet. Without minimizing the other concerns raised by your essay—human rights, women’s rights, feminism—our question focuses on the matter of sexual diversity in human nature, and especially of same-sex love.

Do we understand correctly that you consider the relationship portrayed in the illustration above to be satanic, pagan, mentally ill? Is it for such relationships that God obliterated Sodom and Gomorrah from the face of the earth? Is it about such a relationship that you wrote the following?

Any relationship between members of the same sex [emphasis ours] is a sin that is destructive of man’s spiritual, psychological and physical being because it reveals man’s submission to impulse and the devil who corrupts minds and souls and destroys hearts. Thirty years ago and earlier, psychology generally considered homosexuals to be mentally ill…. This is the “great farce of freedom” in what is called “the civilized world”, which by legalizing such deviance has become the dying world, requiring chastisement, indeed, divine punishment as happened to Sodom and Gomorrah, tomorrow soon to be seen… unless humankind returns to its true reality written in nature by creation and to the image of God in it, since everything is called to holiness.

We respectfully await your clarification of whether our interpretation of your essay accurately reflects your judgment on relationships such as illustrated above.

Yours in Christ,

Gay and Lesbian Orthodox Christians around the World

*Jamie Arpin-Ricci is an author, community activist, and Mennonite pastor in Winnipeg MB. He dabbles in digital and AI generated art as a hobby.

See the extensive Sexuality and Gender section in both Archives linked at the top of this page.

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