A good thing because homosexuality shouldn’t be illegal.
In the Summa Theologica, which he was working on when he died in 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas held that “the unnatural vice” is the greatest of the sins of lust.[56] In his Summa contra Gentiles, traditionally dated to 1264, he argued against what he called “the error of those who say that there is no more sin in the emission of the semen than in the ejection of other superfluous products from the body” by saying that, after murder, which destroys an existing human being, disordinate emission of semen to the preclusion of generating a human being seems to come second.[57]
Anna Clark says that sodomy increasingly began to be identified as the most heinous of sins by authorities of the Catholic Church. In Italy, Dominican monks would encourage the pious to “hunt out” sodomites and once done to hand them to the Inquisition to be dealt with accordingly. She writes, “These clerical discourses provided a language for secular authorities to condemn sodomy… By persecuting sodomites as well as heretics, the Church strengthened its authority and credibility as a moral arbiter”.[58]
By the time of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Church accepted that “secular authorities, as well as clergy, should be allowed to impose penalties on ‘sodomites’ for having had sexual relations”, and by the end of the 13th century, “homophobic discourse became insitutionalised ,… Sodomites were now demons as well as sinners.”.[59] Civil authorities were in fact already trying the crime of sodomy in their own courts. They applied punishments very different from those that the Church applied, such as excommunication and deposition from the clerical state. They followed Roman civil law, which prescribed death by burning for those found guilty of sodomy.[60] In 1232, Pope Gregory IX established the Roman Inquisition which investigated claims of sodomitical acts when, in 1451, Pope Nicholas V enabled it to prosecute men who practice sodomy. Handed over to the civil authorities, those condemned were frequently, in accordance with civil law, burned.[60]
The evil EU that reveres as its founders men who were Catholics?
