New law seeking to extend rights of heterosexuals to homosexual couples met with fierce opposition from Orthodox church

It has required decades of campaigning and more than a few tears, but the Greek parliament will take the first steps towards legalising same-sex unions in a country that has long rebuffed the move.

The step made on Monday has spurred fierce debate, with the Greek Orthodox bishop Ambrosios of Kalavryta calling on the church faithful to denounce those he described as “freaks of nature”.

“Whenever and wherever you meet them, spit on them,” he announced in an acerbic blog post. “Condemn them. Blacken them. They are not human! They are freaks of nature!”

The parliamentary committee begins discussing the bill two years after Greece was fined by the European court of human rights for failing to extend protective rights, including domestic partnerships, to gays and lesbians.

Under the leftist-led government of Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, activists in Greece’s increasingly visible LGBT community had hoped the wrong would be redressed without much ado. But the enforced cohabitation with the small rightwing Independent Greeks party, and the persistence of homophobic views even on the left, has resulted in foot-dragging. Greece remains the last EU state after Latvia not to recognise same-sex unions.

While the new law seeks to confer the same rights on homosexual couples as those enjoyed by heterosexuals – namely inheritance rights and ability to declare common tax declarations – campaigners say it fails to go far enough.

“The bill does not provide equality before the law, especially in regard to adoption and custody of children, but it comes close,” LGBT campaigner Leo Kalovyrnas said. “Politicians in this country tend to hide behind the church but they, too, across the board, are homophobic.”

In a society marked by its social conservatism – despite being identified with the hedonistic culture enjoyed by millions of tourists every year – the Orthodox church is not alone in being stridently opposed to equality for gay people.

Blocking legislation last year, the justice minister in Athens’ then two-party centre-right government announced that same sex marriage amounted to a “danger” for a nation that respected tradition.

“I won’t discuss it, I can’t conceive of it,” Haralambos Athanasiou told a TV interviewer. “What are the consequences going to be? “Are we going to go as far as talking about adoption [by same-sex couples] next?”

Orthodox canon law, which allows for as many as three marriages, explicitly excludes approval of same-sex unions. “Sexual intercourse is a gift from God, but a gift given for use between man and woman only within the sacrament of marriage,” Timothy Ware, otherwise known as Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, wrote in his acclaimed introduction to eastern Christianity. “But in all specific cases of homosexuality we should of course seek to show the upmost sensitivity and generous compassion.”

Last week, cartoonists in Greece depicted Ambrosios blessing a member of the homophobic neo-fascist Golden Dawn party for acting on his appeal to lash out at gay people. Ambrosios, it was agreed, had crossed the red line of “generous compassion” his own church demanded in such matters.

While the legislation is expected to pass with the help of the centre-left opposition, gay rights campaigners declared they would be suing the bishop for the untrammelled hate speech he had exhibited in his blog.