|
|
Sunday, February 29, 2004
|
|
MORE ANTI-PAPIST FUN
While the Jesus Snuff Movie is making ungodly profits, His earthly messengers continue to be a giant pain in the ass. For the second time in less than a week, Pope John Paul II has come out against gay marriage. This time he went a step further. The pontiff demanded that all Catholic office holders refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.
The Pope is managing to garner more anti-papism in the United States than I could ever hope to. It's fantastic, really. Quick question: how many Catholics have been nominated by a major party for president? Quick answer: two. Al Smith in 1928 and John Kennedy in 1960. None before and none since. A big reason for this is that voters in the predominantly protestant America are of the belief that a Catholic president would follow his religious beliefs to the detriment of the constitution. In short, people were (and very probably still are) afraid that American policy would be dictated in Rome. And Rome's policies are decidedly goofier than those Washington comes up with on it's own. These policies include;
-No gay marriage
-No abortion, under any circumstances
-No divorce, under any circumstances
-Telling illiterate Africans (who, in places have an HIV/AIDS rate of 40%) that condoms are an ineffective defense against contracting AIDS
-The Jews killed Christ (revised in 1962)
-Speak Latin even though no one else does (revised circa 1967)
-Having a hamburger on Friday will land you in Hell (revised circa 1967)
This makes giant tax cuts and spending increases and quibbling if blowjobs are sex seem downright reasonable.
And the Pope just reinforced the idea that Rome is calling the shots with Catholic officeholders. This is bad. Italians can barely run Italy at this point. The Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is now on his third criminal indictment and the two most famous women ever elected to parliment were a porn star and Benito Mussolini's grand-daughter. Jesus, just look at what's happened to the Mafia in the last 20 years. Even Italian Americans would be uncomfortable having Rome run anything anymore.
There's another little problem. The Vatican is a sovereign state. The Pope is its Head of State. Most countries have a very, very big problem with foreigners interfering with the domestic politics. It would kinda be like....I dunno, a Canadian writing editorials to U.S newspapers telling them why they should allow gay marriage. And we all know that that would never happen. Most countries would file a very strongly worded protest if a foreign Head of State did something like that. Then they would probably expel that countries Ambassador.
Most foreign leaders don't have 40 million followers who vote in presidential elections. The Pope does. All countries are decidedly not created equal.
But the best part of the Pope's foray into American politics is the timing. It comes exactly one day after a report that reveals a full 4% of American priests of the last half century were sexual predators. It was also revealed that most people in the hierarchy didn't think that sex with children was necessarily a bad thing. One can safely assume that the Church's position is that gay sex isn't "damaging to the family" if one partner is hairless and the other took a vow of celibacy.
Or maybe they're just afraid of gay divorce.
|
|
|
| |
