Seven clerics of the Greek Orthodox Church (GOC) have signed a document addressed to Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis saying that homosexuality is not a legitimate sexual choice but a deviation and perversion of nature.

The letter has been sent in response to the new national campaign video promoting gay marriage in Greece titled ‘Say Yes’ (Pes To Nai), directed by famous Greek actor and screenwriter Giorgos Kapoutzidis.

The video features four queer couples living in four different times, 1952, 1974, 2004 and 2022 while the motto “we have always been here” is repeated. Watch the video here:

The group of priests have appealed to prevent the LGBT community’s initiative regarding “equal access to marriage”, according to Ekklisia Online.

In their letter they state that their position is “a testimony of the Church” and the LGBT community’s initiative to legalise the same-sex marriage is an “old story”.

“A small minority with wide access to the media, both print and online, has pressured governments and parties for years to legally recognise their sexual deviance,” the document says adding that “even those Christians who maintain a loose relationship with the Church know that God created two sexes, male and female”, and that “there is no third sex”.

“The mutual attraction of man to woman and woman to man opens the way to marriage, which in the Christian Church is considered the ‘great mystery’, the secret of love, the source and cradle of human life and the path that leads to the Christian perfection of spouses and children,” the Greek Orthodox priests insisted.

“The Church blesses these intimate relationships and considers the family that a Christian marriage creates to be a small ‘domestic’ church. Therefore, it is only natural that apart from blessed Christian marriage, the Church does not accept any other kind of marriage for its members, Christians.”

Furthermore, the priests touched on homosexuality as a phenomenon stressing that the Church’s position is adamant and that it “has been more than clear from its inception until today: homosexuality is not a legitimate sexual choice but a deviation and perversion of nature”.

Quoting Apostle Paul, they said that any diversion from the perceived as ‘straight’ expression of sexuality between the female and male genders is “a heavy, deadly carnal sin which, if the person who commits it does not repent, excludes him from the kingdom of God”.

In their letter the clerics make clear that the Church in no way accepts or reconciles with the sin, adding that “in no case does it deviate from the laws of nature which God has decreed” and that “in no case does it agree to place Christian marriage between a man and a woman and ‘free cohabitation’, whether heterosexual or homosexual, on more or less equal footing with the blessed Christian family”.