Actor Evangelos Busis and fashion designer Peter Dundas have become the first gay couple to have an Orthodox baptism for their children in Greece. The couple's children were baptized by the Archbishop of America from the Orthodox Church of Constantinople. This is reported by the Greek Reporter.
“Yesterday was a truly special moment, not only for me and my family, but for our entire Greek Orthodox Church… Thank you to our great spiritual leader, His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, for infant baptism and for not rejecting a single child or member of our faith,” wrote George Busis, brother of Evangelos Busis, on Facebook.
According to the Greek edition, many social media users considered this event a sign of great progress of the Greek Orthodox Church in terms of acceptance of the LGBT community.
“This is the progress and leadership we need in our church, where no person should ever be rejected by our Lord because of who they are, how they want to live their lives, and who they love,” said George Busis.
Orthodox churches, similarly to official Catholicism, condemn homosexual relationships as a sin. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church in "Fundamentals of the Social Concept" states that: "The Holy Scriptures and the teachings of the Church unequivocally condemn homosexual sexual relations, seeing in them a vicious distortion of the God-given nature of man."