Sweden's Prime Minister has vowed to force all priests working for the Church of Sweden to perform same-sex marriages even if their faith tells them not to.
"No priest in the Swedish Church can refuse to marry same-sex couples" regardless of the priest's view on the matter, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said in a recent interview with the Church of Sweden's newspaper Kyrkans Tidning.
Lofven also supports a motion to only allow priests who agree with same-sex marriage the opportunity to be ordained, according to Breitbart.
Lofven, a Social Democrat, compared priests who refuse to wed same-sex couples with midwives refusing to carry out abortions. "If you are a midwife you either have to carry out abortions, or you have to find another profession. The same goes for priests who do not want to wed homosexuals," CBN News quoted him as saying based from the interview.
Lofven was apparently referring to Swedish Christian midwife Ellinor Grimmark, who was forced to seek work in another country because she refused to participate in abortions. Grimmark has taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Church of Sweden "offers" both heterosexual and homosexual marriage ceremonies. Even though it is not against gay marriage, the church's official stance is that "no priest should be obliged to officiate at the wedding of a same-sex couple," according to RT.
In the interview, the Swedish prime minister said the state church should be an "open democratic church...that stands for equal rights of all people. People who love each other, regardless of their sex, should have the same right to marriage."
He favors changes in church law that would make a willingness to perform same-sex weddings a requirement for ordination.
Lofven defended the government's incursion in the practice of religion, saying "the church must stand up for human equality."
"The church will continue to play a major role, especially in times like these with terror and refugee crisis," he added.
"The church binds society together and provides security," he added.
The Swedish church is known as one of the most left-wing progressive churches in the world, taking stance on many issues that has shocked Christians in other countries.
In 2015, the lesbian Bishop of Stockholm Eva Brunne caused a major controversy when she announced that she would be taking down crosses in churches in order to give Muslims a place to pray instead, according to Breitbart.
Recently, some members of the church were criticized for calling on Swedes to stop celebrating their "poisonous" national holiday, saying , "the patriarchal thinking that celebrates traditional masculinity as strength ... and reduces men to soldiers, and women to mothers ... does not create good conditions for a world without borders."
