Liberation from the ties of mainstream social discourse is an ongoing challenge for Critical Community Psychology. Together with political and economic constraints, the everyday use of language provides a framework of repertoires that shape our understanding of the social world and its phenomena in a routinized and uncritical way. The phenomena themselves are not objective things “out there”, but they are continuously deconstructed and reconstructed, according to their function and context of use. In this presentation, we aim to explain how the Roman Catholic Church discourse on homosexuality and related topics (civil unions, equality marriage, same-sex parents’ adoptions) is based on stereotypes that portray homosexuals as a social danger. By defining the homosexual as an intrinsically disordered person, the doctrine nourishes negative media discourses around LGBT rights with misleading information based on ‘common sense’ assumptions and stereotypes. We will discuss the preliminary findings from a research project on the official documentation of the Roman Catholic Church; all data analysed are in English and sourced from the public domain. We will examine the rhetorical construction of the arguments underpinning the fear of homosexual unions’ recognition, using a discourse analytic approach to ideologies and a critical community psychology framework. We would like to contribute to the critical knowledge of use of everyday discourse, as it is often shared in our communities’ dialogues, media, and communications. We believe this is a good point for the critical praxis on the long way towards the liberation of the biological exuberance of human nature
