The Chief Rabbi of France has announced his resignation today (11 April), a day after the Senate voted in favor of gay marriage and adoption.

Gilles Bernheim has admitted to plagiarizing his essay in which he condemned marriage equality and gay parenting.

The head of France’s Jewish community also admitted to not having a qualification in philosophy, blaming it on being ill on the day he took an exam.

When the scandals was revealed, Bernheim said he would act with ‘humility’ and said resigning would be a ‘desertion’.

In the past, Bernheim has argued the ‘Marriage for All’ bill was ‘nothing but a slogan’.

He wrote: ‘The argument that marriage is for all of those in love does not hold — it is not because people love each other that they systematically have the right to marry.

‘Marriage is not only a recognition of love. It is the institution that links the joining of a man and woman with the succession of generations.’

Bernheim also opposed granting any adoption rights to LGBT couples, which is a key component of the proposed marriage equality bill.

He said this is because a ’child develops through differentiating… It needs, therefore, to know that it comes from love and union between a man, his father, and a wife, his mother, as a result of the sexual difference between the parents’.

Pope Benedict XVI praised and quoted Bernheim’s essay in his Christmas address in 2012, when he said gay people are destroying humanity.