Pope Francis To Meet Married Gay Activist

Pope Francis will hold his first-ever meeting with a married gay activist during a visit to Paraguay next month.

The activist is Simón Cazal, executive director of the Paraguayan LGBT rights group SOMOSGAY, who married another SOMOSGAY activist, Sergio López, in neighboring Argentina in 2012. Though the pope has reportedly held pastoral meetings with some LGBT people, this meeting marks the first time he will publicly meet with an LGBT political activist. Cazal received an invitation on June 4 from the committee of the Paraguayan bishops’ conference to participate in a roundtable with the pope and civil society leaders. The invitation — provided to BuzzFeed News by SOMOSGAY — said it was extended in recognition of the “high impact of your organization on Paraguayan society.” The meeting will be held on July 11 in the capital, Asunción.

SOMOSGAY says the invitation to meet with the pope came as a surprise as they had not requested an audience during the papal visit. Paraguay currently does not offer any legal protections to its LGBT citizens and a constitutional ban on same-sex unions was enacted in 1992. Homosexuality has been legal there since 1880.

PARAGUAY: Presidential Candidate Says He'd Shoot Himself If His Son Were Gay

Paraguay will hold its presidential election this Sunday and leading candidate Horacio Cartes has sparked a furor with ugly statements on gay rights.

[Cartes] set off a fierce controversy here after publicly comparing gay people to “monkeys” and likening the support of same-sex marriage to believing in “the end of the world.” In a radio interview this month, Mr. Cartes, 57, theatrically threatened to inflict harm on his own private parts if his 28-year-old son were to seek to marry another man. “I would shoot myself in the testicles, because I do not agree,” he said, using slightly more colorful language to describe how he would react to such a possibility.

Cartes' opponent also opposes same-sex marriage but says that he's open to discussion on the issue, which has become a hot topic locally after nearby Uruguay legalized gay marriage earlier this month. A Paraguayan LGBT rights group has demanded that Cartes apologize.

A Curious President's Day Factoid

Here's a bizarre President's Day fact. The most popular former U.S. president in Paraguay is Rutherford B. Hayes.

Forget Lincoln or Washington. Rutherford B. Hayes — a one-term U.S. president who is undistinguished at home — has a holiday, a province, a town, a museum and a soccer team all named in his honor, thanks to an 1878 arbitration in which he handed Paraguay 60 percent of its land. "If it weren't for Hayes, Paraguay would have a smaller territory than it has today," said Salvador Garozzo, director of the municipal museum in the town of Villa Hayes, capital of Presidente Hayes province. After a regional war in the late 1800s, Argentina and Paraguay asked the United States to decide a bitter dispute over Paraguay's Chaco region — a swath of blistering-hot terrain about the size of Michigan that today is an important source of cattle ranching. Archives indicate that a low-level State Department official most likely drew up the ruling that Secretary of State William Evarts then handed to Hayes to sign, said Tom Culbertson, executive director of Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio.

Now we know something about Paraguay.