Prosecutors in the Netherlands have opened an investigation to determine whether Christians have violated Dutch law by signing the “Nashville Statement” affirming traditional marriage.

Last week, some 250 Dutch Christian leaders, including the leader of the SGP Christian party, signed the statement after it was translated into Dutch and posted on the internet.

As Breitbart News reported, leading Evangelical Christians published the Nashville Statement in August 2017. The manifesto reaffirmed Christian teaching on God’s creation of human beings as male and female, rejecting attempts to normalize “gender fluidity” based on “autonomous preferences.”

The authors asserted traditional sexual morality based on biblical norms, declaring that the path to full and lasting joy is found by embracing God’s good design for his creatures rather than “the path of shortsighted alternatives that, sooner or later, ruin human life and dishonor God.”

Although the Nashville Statement went no further than to restate what Christians have always believed about marriage and sexual morality, it immediately came under fire from LGBT activists as well as the mainstream media, who portrayed the document as bigoted, prejudiced, and antiquated.

The Huffington Post said the statement was “Anti-LGBTQ” because of its failure to embrace homosexual relations and transgenderism. The Chicago Tribune similarly labeled the text as “Anti-LGBT” while offering “a more loving” statement of its own that basically says that any sex is good sex.

Shortly after the statement’s release, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput came out in defense of the text, pushing back against attempts by the mainstream media to redefine traditional biblical morality as hate speech.

There is nothing “shocking or belligerent” in the document, the archbishop argued, since it is a simple restatement of historic biblical beliefs about marriage, chastity, and the nature of human sexuality.

Chaput said that a “methodical effort is now playing out in the mass media to recast biblical truths as a form of ‘hate,’ to reshape public opinion away from those biblical truths, and to silence anyone who stays faithful to Christian teaching on matters of sexual behavior, sexual identity, family and marriage.”

“The message is simple,” the archbishop said. “Conform to the new herd dogmas or enjoy the consequences. Which explains the river of public contempt that was quickly poured out on the Nashville Statement.”

Dutch LGBT activists have echoed the criticisms of the text made by their American counterparts, and the Public Prosecution Service is now reviewing the statement to see if it breaks Dutch law in any way.

According to the Christian Post, pro-LGBT opera singer Francis van Broekhuizen filed a formal police complaint against parliament member Kees van der Staaij for signing the statement, claiming that the document is a call for “discriminating against [LGBT] people.”

The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001, but not everyone believes that same-sex marriage is a good or holy thing.

Another pro-LGBT group, COC Netherlands, said the statement is a “damaging document” and accused those who signed the text of “merciless and insensitive action.”

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