Research show that religion is significantly correlated with negative attitudes towards gays and lesbians. It is, in fact, one of the most important factors, which shapes homophobic attitudes. The paper takes the Roman Catholic Church doctrine on (homo)sexuality as a framework for analyses of same-sex partnership debates in Slovenia. It focuses on the changing role of the Church by analyzing its discursive strategies and tactics used to frame the debate around issues of sexuality, gender, marriage and family. It shows how the Church is secularizing its discourse in order to “clericalise” society and reinvents issues of family and marriage as an ideological battleground of contemporary cultural wars in post-socialist societies, within which gays and lesbians are constructed as outsiders of the nation.
