Hungarian legislation to ban changing sex on official documents  

May 20, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

CNA Staff, May 20, 2020 / 06:36 pm (CNA).- A bill passed by the Hungarian Parliament this week stipulates that birth certificates and other identification documents must state individuals’ sex at birth and cannot be changed based on gender identity.

The legislation was proposed by the Fidesz party, led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It passed 133 votes to 57, and now awaits the signature of President János Áder.

Orbán said the bill would help prevent legal ambiguity. An individual's sex would be repalced with the phrase “sex assigned at birth” on official documents and in the national registry.

Advocates of the bill argued that it is impossible to completely change a person’s biological sex, and that this reality should be reflected in the civil registry, Forbes reported.

The government’s communication office stressed that the change “does not affect men's and women's right to freely experience and exercise their identities as they wish,” according to the BBC.

Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen presented the bill on March 31 as part of a wide-ranging packet of legislation. Opposition parties issued amendments, but these were thrown out on Tuesday.

LGBT advocates and opposing parties have decried the law, arguing that it could further discrimination against the transgender community. MP Bernadett Szél described the legislation as “evil.” Tina Korlos Orban, vice president of the Transvanilla Transgender Association, said the change in policy will create a sense of panic among the transgender community.

The Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education denounced gender ideology last year and affirmed the principles of human dignity, difference, and complementarity, while rejecting unjust discrimination.

“In all such [gender] theories, from the most moderate to the most radical, there is agreement that one’s gender ends up being viewed as more important than being of male or female sex,” the congregation wrote in a June 2019 document, entitled “Male and Female He Created Them.”

“The effect of this move is chiefly to create a cultural and ideological revolution driven by relativism, and secondarily a juridical revolution, since such beliefs claim specific rights for the individual and across society,” the document said.

 

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French Senate stipulates that Notre-Dame be rebuilt as it was

May 28, 2019 CNA Daily News 0

Paris, France, May 28, 2019 / 06:01 pm (CNA).- The French Senate on Monday passed a bill on the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, the city’s cathedral, adding a clause that it must be rebuilt as it was before last month’s fire which destroyed its roof and spire.

The Senate approved the bill May 27, mandating that the rebuilding be faithful to Notre-Dame’s “last known visual state.”

The government of president Emmanuel Macron had begun an architectural competition to submit a variety of suggestions for the restoration. Macron had called for “an inventive reconstruction” of the cathedral.

The Senate also removed from the bill a clause allowing the government to override planning, environmental and heritage protection, and public tenders regulations, which would have hastened the rebuilding.

It modified a tax break, allowing donations for reconstruction made from April 15, the day of the fire, to be tax-deductible. An earlier version of the bill had allowed only donations made from April 16.

The modifications of the bill made by the Senate mean that it must be reconciled with a version passed earlier by the National Assembly before it can become law.

Since the adoption of the 1905 law on separation of church and state, which formalized laïcité, a strict form of public secularism, religious buildings in France have been property of the state.

A fire broke out in the cathedral shortly before 7 pm April 15. The roof and the spire, which dated to the 19th century, were destroyed. Shortly after midnight April 16, firefighters announced that the cathedral’s main structure had been preserved from collapse.

The major religious and artistic treasures of the cathedral were removed as the fire began, including a relic of the crown of thorns.

Originally built between the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, the landmark cathedral in the French capital is one of the most recognizable churches in the world, receiving more than 12 million visitors each year.

The cathedral was undergoing some restorative work at the time the fire broke out, though it is unknown if the fire originated in the area of the work.

Officials had been in the process of a massive fundraising effort to renovate the cathedral against centuries of decay, pollution, and an inundation of visitors. French conservationists and the archdiocese announced in 2017 that the renovations needed for the building’s structural integrity could cost as much as $112 million to complete.

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