June 25, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Following a declaration by the Mexican Supreme Court nullifying state laws prohibiting “marriage” to people of the same sex, Nuevo Laredo Bishop Gustavo Rodríguez Vega has issued his own declaration along with the clergy of his diocese, assuring the faithful that he will suffer imprisonment rather than cooperate with such unions.

“They can’t require an institution like this Church to go against its principles,” the archdiocesan clergy are quoted as saying in various local and national news reports. “Let the Supreme Court send the bishops and the priests to jail, whomever they want, but the Church cannot go against the law of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“We know that we can go to jail, if some couple decides to marry civilly, but we won’t give it a blessing. This law cannot obligate the Church, the Church cannot go against its principles and in fact the only ones who will come to the Church will be those who share our principles,” they add.

The clergy of the diocese affirm that their position is “based on scientific, anthropological, social, and religious reasons” which prove that marriage is between “a man and a woman (...) as the juridical tradition of thousands of years of the West affirms, a tradition of two thousand years; it is the union of one man and one woman who wish to procreate.” They call the decision of the Supreme Court to create homosexual “marriage” a “parting of the waters, and the whole world is not going to be in agreement and the Church is not in agreement with this definition.”

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The country’s Supreme Court issued a declaration on June 12 purporting to nullify state laws confining marriage to one man and one woman or tying the institution to procreation, claiming that such laws are “unconstitutional.”

According to recent Supreme Court decisions, it is “discriminatory” to link “the requirements of marriage to sexual preferences,” as this “unjustifiably excludes homosexual couples -who are in similar conditions as heterosexual couples- from marriage,” the Court stated. It added its claim that it is “unsuitable” to “consider that the purpose of marriage is procreation,” and affirmed that the “only constitutional purpose this decree acknowledges is the protection of family as a social reality.”