The Catholic Church is obsessed with sex. Not their sex, your sex. They supposedly don't have any sex. According to the Catholic Church, the Catholic god has very strict rules about the sex you may have. It must be monogamous, heterosexual, only after (a Catholic) marriage and with no aids, for either pleasure or contraception. In other words, boring and monochromatic. This is so even though he may have made you with a strong sex drive toward members of your own sex or toward other prohibited sexual conduct.
This obsession with sex is second only to scientific ignorance and backwardness in setting the Catholic Church apart from other Christian religions. It seems an odd and trivial obsession for a being powerful enought to create the Universe. As a coffee cup in my office says; “Catholicism is the belief that an invisible, infinitely-old, all-knowing, all-powerful super being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, has a personal interest in my sex life.”
For a start, membership in the priesthood of the Catholic Church is restricted to males. They don’t like having girls around. Women are not allowed to be ordained and, nor give Communion and for centuries were subject to numerous restrictions, such as standing on an altar, that men were not. In a remarkable response to the recent worldwide pedophilia scandal, on July 15, 2010, the Vatican issued a statement that, among other things - mostly cosmetic changes to its procedures for handling pedophilia - stated that admitting women to the priesthood was as grave an offense as the molestation of young boys (See NY Times, Friday July 16, 2010 @ A1).
This is how offensive these men find the thought of being around women. Whether this is more misogyny or gynophobia may be of academic interest to psychologists, but the end result for female Catholics is the same; they are second class citizens. At some level this should not be so surprising. The Catholic Church is made up exclusively of men who, around age 20, agreed never to touch a woman their entire lives. At age 20 – when their sex drive is peaking. If, at the peak of their sexual libido, they can agree never to touch a woman, just think how easy it is to eschew women at 60 or 70, the age at which most power is wielded in the church.
In effect, you have 60 year old cross-dressers who have never touched a woman telling the rest of us what is sexually “normal”. It’s a bit like a 60 year old, life-long Vegan writing the rules on how best to cook steak.
Who is the man that, at 20, can agree never to touch a woman? The classic answer, that “I am a normal male, but am sacrificing and giving my life to Jesus” is highly suspect to me. I believe that, either their sex drive is extremely low or they are closeted gays or closeted members of other sexual minorities. In either case, they are deprived of a normal sex drive toward women. It is a lot easier to give up dessert if you don’t like sugar.
The recent pedophilia scandal certainly suggests a reason why many priests find it easy to swear off women. It's not so much that abstinence makes the church grow fondlers as it is fondlers find it easier to be abstinent (at least as far as grown women are concerned). Although, to be fair, I think the Catholic church got a bum rap there. I doubt that the proportion of pedophiles in the Catholic Church is vastly greater than in any large number of males who put themselves in a position of constantly being around children. I also know how the US civil litigation system works and how claims are routinely exaggerated or even fabricated to line the pockets of plaintiffs' lawyers.
That said, locking yourself away in a presbytery with a group of other men who have likewise sworn off women, and then dressing in robes every couple of days, is still pretty suspect. However, it really is none of my business. I simply have no interest in the sex lives of priests, nor the right to tell them what sexual conduct they may or may not engage in. In fact, I actually hope that these poor closeted fools have a very vibrant and exciting sex life behind the presbytery’s doors. I would like to envisage your average presbytery as a hot bed of homosexual intrigue, where tiptoeing forays down the halls at midnight are as common an occurrence as in those old chase scenes from Scooby Doo cartoons.
Even where they set “sex rules” for Catholics to follow, such as no sex before marriage, that too is (perhaps to a lesser extent) still their business. Membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary and any Catholic is, nowadays at least, free to leave the church if they do not like its rules. What I despise, however, is when they go a step further and want to impose their comical views on the rest of us. On non-Catholics.
A classic case is condom use. The Catholic Church has an almost unmatchable reach into the Third World. Through its network of small churches and priests and other workers on the ground, it could be the World’s most effective outlet for handing out condoms to protect the poor in places like AIDS ridden Africa and Central and South America. However, due to its draconian views on sex, it not only refuses to do so, but lobbies governments to prohibit condoms and tells its ignorant third-World faithful that their use is a sin.
Any public health official will tell you that this stance by the Catholic Church has been a direct cause in the deaths of millions in the Third World and the cause of millions of unwanted children being born to mothers who cannot afford them (I guess, in the Church’s view, the two net out). Still today, there is a rumor that from time to time rears its ugly head in sub-Saharan Africa, that condoms cause AIDS. Not only does the Catholic Church fail to publicly quash this rumor whenever it springs up, but uses it to its advantage to stop the use of condoms. It was also only over staunch opposition from the Catholic Church that Brazil recently introduced a program to make condoms publicly accessible. If the International Criminal Courts in The Hague had jurisdiction over negligent homicide, Church leaders would be lined up in the docks three deep, like Nazis at Nuremberg.
The “saintly” Mother Theresa was notorious for this. In her view, it was better that thousands of poor children be born into the grinding poverty of the Black Hole of Calcutta every year than she promote condoms and other contraceptives.
Besides this, there are innumerable other examples of the Catholic Church imposing its views on non-Catholics. Censorship and the banning of movies it objects to, the banning of books and art it considers too liberal or “pornographic”, and the imprisonment of people who engage in sex it considers “sinful”, such as the heinous act of oral sex in most states in the Bible Belt.
Hell, even masturbation is out. Apart from blasphemy, masturbation must be the ultimate victimless crime!! I once saw a bumper sticker on an evangelical church bus in Australia; “Every time you masturbate, Satan drowns a kitten.” Way to guilt out your teenage devotees! Given how much I, shall we say, enjoyed my adolescent years, I was reminded immediately of the expression, “How many cats in New York City”….
However, for pure ignorance and overreaching, nothing comes close to the Catholic Church’s draconian views on homosexuality. What the men who don’t like women don’t like most of all is men who don’t like women. To quote directly from official Church literature:
"Basing itself on sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved" (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357).
Another articulation of the Church’s position can be found at http://www.catholic.com/library/Homosexuality.asp. The net out of the various position statements of the Catholic church on homosexuality is:
(i) homosexual urges are not a sin, but acting on them or even enjoying homosexual fantasies is (remember, the Sky-Fairy can read your mind);
(ii) the Biblical justification for this oppression can be found in a number of places, most notably, in the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah (offering one’s own daughters up to be gang-raped is seen as “par for the course”) Leviticus – where else- and various letters of St. Paul, most of which call for the death penalty for gays.
The biblical texts quoted by the church in support of its position include these classics of enlightenment and intelligence:
“Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
And
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. . . . If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them".
In other words, gays are an abomination, or the equivalent of thieves and swindlers and should be killed. Taking a conservative estimate, that 5% of the population is gay (estimates range from this up to about 15% - about the same as it currently does for atheists) there are 300 million gay people in the World. This is about the population of the USA. At any given point, millions of them are having sex, masturbating or simply engaging in sexual fantasies. According to the Catholic Church, the Catholic god keeps a disapproving eye on all of them seven days a week, records all their actions in real time and makes a note to smite or otherwise punish them. This is on official Catholic Church web sites as their current, Twenty-First Century position on homosexuality. I’m not making this stuff up. According to the Catholic church, their god is basically a voyeristic, stalking pervert.
In addition, however, just so we don’t think it narrow minded, the Catholic Church has other, non-biblical reasons for despising homosexuality. I will cite directly from an official Church site for this one, lest you think I exaggerate;
“We perceive intuitively that the natural sex partner of a human is another human, not an animal.
The same reasoning applies to the case of homosexual behavior. The natural sex partner for a man is a woman, and the natural sex partner for a woman is a man. Thus, people have the corresponding intuition concerning homosexuality that they do about bestiality—that it is wrong because it is unnatural”.
See, for example, http://www.catholic.com/library/Homosexuality.asp
In short, my gay friends, you have just been downgraded from mere theft, swindling and other property offenses to bestiality. In a slight nod to modern science (which they say is “doubtful”) the Church says that, even if homosexuality is genetic, that does not excuse it because, like alcoholism, the urges should be controlled.
Make that drunken bestiality.
Finally, in a pallid attempt at progressiveness, and while still condemning homosexuality, the Catholic Church preaches “compassion toward the sinner” and denounces violence against gays. Did you get that – it denounces violence against gays. Having equated them to drunken, thieving pig-fuckers and citing with approval calls for their deaths, it denounces violence against them! But let’s face it, the Catholic Church is hardly an institution that concerns itself with small things like glaring doctrinal contradictions and hypocrisy.
Their core claim, that homosexuality is immoral, is just flat unsupported and wrong. In terms of generosity, caring, honesty, integrity and the other personality traits we commonly refer to as “morals” there is simply no correlation whatsoever between morality or immorality and homosexuality. Certainly, I would put the few gay friends I do have up against their persecutors any day of the week. In point of fact, I have never in my life seen nor heard of a group of gays calling for the oppression, imprisonment or death of Catholics. Given the above, it must be a tempting thought. Perhaps our robed and women-hating friends can learn much from the gay community about turning the other cheek.
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