Tallinn, Estonia, May 19, 2023
Photo: imgix.net
On May 15, the government of Estonia approved a draft law on amendments to the Family Law and other related laws that has now been submitted to the Parliament for discussion. According to the bill, the law will no longer stipulate that marriage is between a man and a woman. It is planned that the amendments will come into force on January 1, 2024.
Both the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople have issued statements in defense of traditional marriage.
“The Church has always sought to protect society from the substitution of spiritual and moral values. Today, the threat of such substitution is growing—they want to call the ‘sin of Sodom’ a ‘family,’” the statement from the Estonian Orthodox Church, signed by His Eminence Metropolitan Evgeny of Tallinn, begins.
The public consciousness and the Commandment of Love are being cleverly manipulated today, Met. Evgeny writes, and thus those who claim they are championing “freedom and love” are in fact destroying it.
“’Our ancestors sinned, but they called sin a sin, and today’s liberals, sinning, try to justify sin, as though it were a legitimate cause,’ exclaimed the righteous St. John of Kronstadt (+ 1908),” Met. Evgeny recalls. “The righteous man considered the rapidly falling morality to be a formidable harbinger of state upheavals. He argued that if the authorities misunderstand freedom, then the people will not be given a clear understanding of this freedom.”
His Eminence also quotes St. John Chrysostom and St. Paisios the Athonite talking about how when the family falls apart, the whole world falls apart.
There is no doubt that the world is changing, Met. Evgeny writes, “but the changes shouldn’t be unnatural.”
He concludes:
In relation to a person, it’s always necessary to fulfill the Commandment of Love for one’s neighbor. Therefore, believers mustn’t hate people who are “weak in spirit,” but they mustn’t accept the sin of Sodom as the norm.
In his own statement, Metropolitan Stephanos of Tallinn of the Patriarchate of Constantinople opens by emphasizing that “rethinking marriage is a dangerous experiment” and that “the term ‘marriage equality’ that is often used in public is unsuccessful and misleading—“After all, marriage equality still applies today, which allows everyone who doesn’t have special obstacles to marry in the way it’s been understood since the beginning of time.”
Though the state looks at marriage as a legal matter, “there is no way around its nature and concept in people’s minds,” Met. Stephanos underlines.
For the Orthodox Church, a lasting marriage between one man and one woman is “the foundation of a whole society and human relations,” he continues. Changing that would change being human as a whole.
Everyone deserves respect, but that doesn’t mean condoning everything they do or their way of life—“We need a line between safe and dangerous, reasonable and unreasonable, and we think that marriage is one such institution that shouldn’t be changed according to every new theory or fashion.”
Rather than changing the meaning of marriage, a cohabitation law is needed “to solve the problems of same-sex couples,” Met. Stephanos writes. But there is no practical need for gender-neutral marriage, he adds, and it is offensive to many.
And the experience of other countries shows that legalizing gay marriage is a slippery slope to things like gender changes for younger and younger people, one-sided sexual education for children, the silencing of critics, and so on.
Lately it seems that “self-proclaimed progressive, Marxist-rooted ideologies that set social justice as a banner have hijacked our public space and the minds of politicians,” the hierarch writes. This is secular extremism and fanaticism.
In conclusion, Met. Stephanos writes: “We invite all parties to a meaningful societal discussion in order to jointly understand the nature and importance of the institution of marriage in the future of our nation.”
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