During his speech in parliament on education issues on 18/1/24, the GS of the CC of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoumbas, made a brief reference to the bill that the New Democracy government will put forward on the marriage of same-sex couples.

“It is hypocritical of you to pretend to behuman rights defenders just because you are going to bring a bill on civil marriage of same-sex couples. Of course, when we are talking about civil marriage of same-sex couples, we are not talking about the recognition of a form of partnership or some regulation regarding the relationship between partners, we are actually talking about adoption and joint parental responsibility. These issues are not two distinct concepts.

On the contrary: same-sex marriagemeans the abolition of paternity - maternity. Itundoubtedly leads to ‘parent 1’, ‘parent 2’, ‘parent 3’ and so on. It leads to the extreme commodification of the female body with surrogacy. This is what civil marriage of same-sex couples practically means. This is the case, no matter if some peopleattempt to draw a distinction between the two issues for obvious reasons.

You claimthat this is an important advance for human rights. You even invoke the rights of children raised by same-sex couples. If you really wanted to amend or improve some of the regulations that exist and relate to the relationship between children and the partner of theirbiological or adoptive parent, regardless of sexual orientation, you could do so. And, thus, you could resolve some practical issues in the interests of child protection.

You say that you will putforward this law because “itapplies in other European countries”. I will notelaborate on this issue today, but what is in place in other European countries is precisely the elimination of the terms mother – father,which are based on the biological complementarity of woman and man in the reproductive process, and their replacement by  ‘parent 1’, ‘parent 2’, etc.

It is the further commercialization of surrogacy, which has become a billion-dollar profit business, and this is far from progress. It is obscurantism, modern-day barbarity and brutal exploitation.

Your responsibility is even greater because you have given the opportunity for obscurantist views on the institution of family to be promoted by various reactionary, extreme right-wing people, who see women only as child producing machines. But also to various other irrational, unscientific views on the ‘social construction of gender’, which even go so far as to dispute objective social reality and even lead to child trafficking anddesigner babies, eugenics in practice, as the President of SYRIZA had recently  stated and implied.

That is all for now. We will examine the specific wording of the ND bill when it comes to parliamentand we will come back to this issue in detail. And to pre-empt the president from telling me that I'm off topic, I want to say that all this concerns the Greek youth and the Greek workers, who have taken to the streets and struggle.”

19.01.2024