Slovenians reject gay adoption law

by Hilary White, Rome Correspondent

LJUBLJANA, March 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Slovenians rejected a proposal to allow homosexuals in registered partnerships to adopt children in a national referendum this weekend. The vote, with approximately 30 percent turnout, was 54.77 per cent to 44.23 per cent, overturning a law that was passed by the country’s National Assembly last June.

Slovenian President Danilo Turk told AFP that such decisions should not be left up to the public, and complained that submitting the law to a public vote had undermined the authority of the National Assembly.

Slovenian President Danilo Turk

“The Code is good and could have entered into force immediately. For the sake of the legislature’s authority, it would be better to have laws implemented and not contested on referendums,” Turk said.

After the new Family Code was passed last year, a group of citizens, supported by the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the Islamic community, launched an initiative to collect the signatures necessary for a referendum. Ales Primic, head of the Civil Initiative for the Family and the Rights of the Child, said that the successful vote would protect the rights of children to a natural family.

The Civil Initiative said the law failed to respect the fact that “only a man and a woman can conceive a child and that a child needs a mother and a father for its upbringing and holistic development.”

Most crucially, they said, the law does not respect the “child’s fundamental right to a mother and a father.”
Primic said the vote sends a clear signal to the powers in Europe that are pressuring to extend the homosexualist agenda into every country.

“Those who wanted to sacrifice this right for the sake of personal privileges have been told unequivocally by the Slovenian people: motherhood and fatherhood are both unique and valued, we want marriage between a man and a woman to be protected, we want our next generation to grow up in the most favorable environment,” Primic told the EU civil rights group European Dignity Watch.

The result of this weekend’s vote came as a surprise to homosexualist campaigners who had assumed that they had the issue in hand, with both the media, President Danilo Turk and most political parties supporting the new law. The movement has made great gains in Slovenia, with the passage of the registered partnership act in 2006. In 2009, the Constitutional Court of Slovenia ruled that it is unconstitutional to refuse to allow registered partners to inherit each other’s property, and the government of the time announced the same year that it would institute “gay marriage” the following year.

The new Family Code was the result of over a year of intense negotiations and its failure will send a message to other EU countries that while the elites may want to alter the building blocks of the civil order, the public may not be willing to go along.