Somebody else is being denied the right to marry. A woman who worked at a Catholic high school was fired because her fiance was divorced.

Doesn’t that just make you feel all warm inside? Our wanna-be overlords of the high priesthood promise us a future of arbitrary regulation of our private lives.

Yeah, the Pope babbles dicta against people who are different from him, so what else is new?

In comments at the Vatican that are likely to provoke a furious reaction from homosexual groups, Benedict also warned that blurring the distinction between male and female could lead to the “self-destruction” of the human race.

In his address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration, he described behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as “a destruction of God’s work” and said that the Roman Catholic Church had a duty to “protect man from the destruction of himself”.

It is not “outmoded metaphysics” to urge respect for the “nature of the human being as man and woman,” he added.
“The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”

Hang on, wait. So Catholics are like trees, and gay people are like chainsaws, or something? And the gays are engaged in clear-cutting church congregations? Homosexuals are out to EXTERMINATE the whole HUMAN RACE?

Wow.

The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official described homosexuality as “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound”.

Well, yeah. A chainsaw can do some pretty nasty damage.

People take the pope rather seriously, I hear. I don’t know why — the man is a kook.

This is not an auspicious beginning. Guess who is going to deliver the invocation at Obama’s inauguration? None other than the smilin’ face of right-wing fundamentalism, Rick Warren.

As we’ve pointed out several times before, in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone. He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice. He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical defintion of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.” He’s declared that those who do not believe in God should not be allowed to hold public office.

Obama had a chance to set a non-sectarian, progressive tone at this event, and he has chosen to kow-tow to the wretched evangelical movement.

Evangelists are suddenly experiencing rapid growth, and wow, are they happy about it!

“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”

What, you might wonder, could possibly be driving more people into the shoutin’ and yellin’ and hellfire churches? Why, it’s the economic downturn!

“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”

Good, fervent Christians overjoyed at the poverty and hardship their congregations are suffering … I’m not surprised. Not surprised at all. And the worse the economy gets, the more these parasites will prosper.

(via Hillary)

The scene above is from a Pentecostal church in Detroit, where workers are rightfully concerned about their economic future. The religious approach, however, seems to be to put a couple of big ol’ dinosaur SUVs (at least they’re hybrids in this case) on stage, streak people’s foreheads with oil, and pray for a big bailout.

I hope they don’t get a dime.

Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time.

There was a protest against the atheist sign in the Washington state capitol this weekend. These people don’t seem to pay much attention to what comes out of their mouths.

“The No. 1 thing is, we want the state of Washington and the governor to represent everyone in the state,” said the Rev. Kenneth Hutcherson, the pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond. “But just because you must represent everyone in the state doesn’t mean that you put up with intolerance from the people that you represent.”

So please tear down the sign representing the views of atheists in Washington! Silly man. And if he’s complaining that the atheist sign says mean things about religion, how does he explain this information from a little later in the story?

After being stolen and returned, the atheists’ sign is now cordoned off in an upstairs hallway next to the bust of George Washington, a sign from Hutcherson’s church mocking the atheists’ sign, a traditional nativity display and two other religious signs.

It sounds like the signs are proliferating. With any luck, the state will realize that all this noise about a holiday is entirely inappropriate, and kick the whole bickering lot of them out. I’d be fine with that — keep the government secular.

Let’s leave the final word in tolerance and fair representation of all view to State Rep. Jim Dunn, who also spoke out at the rally.

“It is time to chase out of the house of God all the unbelievers and evildoers,” Dunn said.

Sometimes the Christian death cult really creeps me out. There is a museum exhibit called Celebrating the Lives and Deaths of the Popes that seems to be particularly heavy on the “death” part. It’s got exhibits to give you the “true sense of attending a Pope’s funeral”, replicas of the geegaws dead popes are dressed up in, and crypt and coffin reproductions. All very morbid and intensely repulsive — do good Catholics actually savor the rituals wrapped around the corpses of their popes?

The conventional wisdom is that it was Vladimir Lenin, but officers in our military have access to secret knowledge, thanks to Rick Warren: it was actually Charles Darwin. We learn this from one of those ghastly power point presentations the military churns up, this one from Air Force Chaplain Christian Biscotti, who argues that the way to prevent suicide is to throw away the facts. At least, that’s the impression I get from the twisted history he serves up to justify his thesis, that Warren’s vacuous little book provides the way to make troops combat ready. It might even be true, if turning soldiers into misinformed and ignorant morons makes them better warriors.

A Catholic abbot is accusing Disney of corrupting children. It’s not because they are transmitting bad ideas, but that they are all tied to Disney’s corporate motives.

While he acknowledges that Disney stories carry messages showing good triumphing over evil, he argues this is part of a ploy to persuade people that they should buy Disney products in order to be “a good and happy family”.
He cites films such as Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians that feature moral battles, but get into children’s imaginations and make them greedy for the merchandise that goes with them.

Now I can sympathize to some extent — Disney’s be-all and end-all is profit, after all — but … it’s coming from a high-ranking member of the Catholic church. You could say exactly the same things about the church: they are promoting high-minded moral values, but at the same time they are tying them to the exclusivity of their church. Why should I think Disneyism is any worse than Catholicism or Lutheranism or the Baptist church?

There’s also another little matter of hypocrisy here, since the Catholic church is one of the last organizations that ought to be complaining about the corruption of children. In another piece of news, a document explaining the Catholic church’s official policy in response to child-abuse allegations has come up. Guess what the message is?

The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of ‘strictest’ secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.

They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to ‘be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.’

You got it — the concern is not for the well-being of children, but for an immediate clamp-down of information and maintenance of internal secrecy. Disney and the Vatican may both be evil organizations, but only one shows a world-wide pattern of child molestation and a policy of protection of serial child abusers.