Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

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  1. If this is how the leaders of Christianity are going to insist on perverting his message, Jesus should be coming back anytime soon to set them straight.

    • My own experience is that those who attack homosexuality and transexuality are often fearful of their own sexuality.  Just saying.

          • I, unlike most of the people here am not judgemental. I am for equal rights. For me too. I know, I’m not a democrat, I’m not entitled.

            • civil rights are you lacking?

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              p>and, no offense, but you are NOT for equal rights. I love people who say they’re for equal rights and think as if that means they’re for them, when they denounce rights for minorities. It cracks me up. Just because you say it doesn’t make it true.  

          • Would he be a bigot if…
            … he condemned you to hell for being disabled?

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            p>I’m pretty sure, though not positiive, that the Catholic Church does not teach that homosexuality is a sin.  If so, I stand corrected.

            • … however this is a distinction without a difference.

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              p>The Pope quoted in Crooked Timber (interesting post too):

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              The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are.

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              p>This is really confusing also when you consider that in addition to actual adultery, the mere act of feeling lust is also a sin.  So is the pope really saying that technically the mere ‘act’ of having homosexual feelings (being a homosexual) isn’t sinful?  But then again, why am I looking for consistency in the first place.  Hell, the statement also further exposes the hypocrisy of not allowing homosexuals to be ordained, even if they don’t commit ‘homosexual acts’.  

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              p>I don’t think there is much to be gained by letting them define nuance boundaries on the battlefield of ideas, given that they don’t have much tolerance for nuance that contests their dogma themselves.  

      • … the fear:  Why churches fear gay marriage.

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        … I think the pro-Proposition 8 movement was really galvanized by an insecurity that churches are feeling now with the rise of women.
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        … What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually — even form our sense of what a sex is — sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

        Laurl’s commentary here.

    • Let those who are without sin toss the first rocks. Glad you moved out of the glass house. Anywhere else, I would agree that it’s tasteless.

    • I received an email column from a Canadian politician who I have supported in the past.  As part of his column, we mentioned the tough conditions for campaigning in Alberta, including the horrific wind chill.

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      p>At the end of his column, the email server had appended an advertisement for weathervanes.  

  3. That the Pope and the monsignor are homosexual lovers?

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    p>Why would you say that?

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    p>To suggest that seems very sophmoric to me. It ruins any worthy commentary that may be contained in the post.

  4. Leonard Link has an interesting take on the pope’s ongoing anti-gay and womb control crusades.  Simply put, “[I]f Catholic women can restrict their reproductive activity without need to restrict their sex lives and Catholic men can live a happy life as gays, the Church’s business model collapses.”  He doesn’t flesh-out the womb-control angle, but presents these interesting thoughts of the gay one:

    It is perfectly understandable, from an institutional point of view, that the Roman Catholic Church is alarmed at the spread of gay rights in the world.  As more and more countries decriminalize homosexual conduct, extend legal recognition to same-sex partners, and ban sexual orientation discrimination, the Roman Catholic Church loses one of its main devices for recruiting new priests.  In an intensely homophobic society, the priesthood, with its purported ideal of the celibate life lived in a unisex environment, has served for centuries as a sheltering environment for self-hating homosexual Catholic men, fleeing societal and family pressures to marry and have children… The sharp decline in new enlistees for the priesthood in societies that have become tolerant of homosexuality is entirely logical.  If a young gay Catholic man sees a way to live openly as gay in society, to have a partner, to have a career, what need is there to flee to the sheltering arms of the allegedly celibate priesthood?  I think the Pope’s position is entirely pragmatic.  …  As CEO of the organization, he must continuously speak out against social trends that undermine the Church’s business model…

    I am not contending that the Pope is not speaking out of religious conviction.  But I am suggesting that leaders of the church in recent decades since the modern gay rights movement has taken root in the Western Democracies have made this a high visibility item on their agenda at a time when so much else in the world calls out to be addressed.  Where is the passionate objection to capital punishment?  Where is the passionate objection to despoiling the earth?  Where is the passionate championing of the needs of the poor for health care, nutrition, sanitation, etc.?  Why is the Church obsessed with fetuses and homosexuals?

  5. of releasing Dignitas Personae earlier this month.  It is the latest instruction of church doctrine on bioethical issues, following 1987’s Donum vitae, and 1968’s Humanae Vitea.  They are still opposed to birth control and IVF, and now have added opposition to genetic engineering (only germline GE, not gene therapy, which they say is “licit” if the risks are acceptably small).

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    p>”Ecology of man” is a good phrase, and describes what is truly needed in this age of expending more and more energy on reproduction and genetic engineering and while everyone’s reproductive rights are threatened by rising infertility and same-sex marriage and liberal eugenics.

  6. You know when an article says “he said”, I kinda expect some sort of quote to follow.  

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    p>Granted that since the speech was in Italian, some liberties are necessary, but skimming through the Pope’s translated speech before the Curia, he doesn’t seem to have said what the article claims he said.

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    p>What it says he said:

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    Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. …

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    p>What he really said (translated):

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    p>

    While highlighting that the Church “cannot and should not limit herself to transmitting just the message of salvation to her faithful”, the Holy Father said that it must also “protect the human being against self-destruction. It is necessary to have something like an ecology of the human being, understood in the proper manner. It is not a surpassed metaphysics when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected. … That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator”.

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    p>I don’t speak pope, and don’t pretend to understand the nuances of the popespeak and what he meant but rather leave that to those more theological than me, but the article you linked seems to be a compendium of a) some liberties with the actual speech plus b) outrage by special interests and c) prior text, all to conclude that the Pope attacked the gay community.

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    p>Those inaccuracies combined with the insinuations that the pope or his assistant or both are gay is all rather bizarre.

    • you reject the summaries provided to the press.  yet you feel free to draw conclusions based on…apparently nothing but your opinions.  lol!  is that how you practice law, too, lol!

      • I publish, word-for-word translated, the Pope’s speech and it bears no reference to homosexuality. None.  

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        p>I publish the “summary” (i.e. apparent fiction), which claims that Pope Benedict

        said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. …

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        p>The article claims he “said” that, does it not?  You published it as a quote.  Either it’s lying or you are.  Which one?

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        p>Read the speech.  He clearly did not “say” that.

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        p>So yeah, in response to your juvenile lol, lol, I do in fact practice law like that.  When a witness tells me so-and-so said something and I find that they in fact did not “say” it, then the witness lied. Got it?

            • Tell me gary, do you believe that Pope Benedict supports full civil equality for gay people?  Despite his frothing at the mouth over the non-binding resolution presented this week to the UN?  Despite his expulsion of gays from the priesthood?  Despite his willingness to pin the church’s pedophilia crimes on gays and gays alone.  Despite his church’s political activities in support of the stripping of LGBT people of civil equality in the United States?  You really believe that?

              • No my beef is with the article that made up quotes from whole clothe, claiming that he said something that he obviously didn’t say.

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                p>And now you attempt to weasel out of it by falling back onto a bigger picture, which is, if you bother to read my original post is my point: the author 1) took some of the Pope’s words 2) added the author’s own bias and 3) put all into context of a bigger background and pretended the Pope said something in the Christmas speech that he did not say.

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                p>Paint the bigger picture all you want, stir in your own biases, but when you post a specific article, make the claim that the Pope said something when he clearly didn’t say it, you or else the article you reference are lying.  

                • so of course you can choose not to “hear” anything in his message.  but multitudes of people who know how to read him, including italians, have interpreted his message the way it was reported in the excerpt above.  bbc, cnn, reuters – they all agree that the pope was attacking gays and perhaps transgender people in that speech. and it would have been exceptional for him if he didn’t, because yes, when you look at the bigger picture, this event is just one more pixel.

                • here is what ratzinger said when he was “god’s rotweiler”, before he was ceo and so could speak more frankly and directly

                  Although Catholic doctrine is that homosexuality is not a sin, the church does condemn homosexual acts and the former Joseph Ratzinger stated in 1986 before he became pope that homosexuality “is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”.

                  evil.  intrinsic moral evil.  Yeah, I feel the love.  To my knowledge he has never recanted that statement.

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                  p>now, you’ll say that it doesn’t matter, because that is not literally what he said on 12/22/08.  but it is figuratively what he said, and what he has been saying throughout his popeship.  he is nothing if not consistent, god bless his little prada-shod feet.

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