More Bullshit From Rome

What could be more illogical than for people forced into lifelong celibacy to pontificate about what constitutes sexual health and how to achieve it? Yet here we have the Catholic church--the widespread protectors and harborers of pederasts--harping yet again that homosexuals are evil and (with unimaginable cheek) claiming that child molestation and homosexuality are linked!

Wednesday's comments by Tarcisio Bertone, the "Deputy Pope" on the matter are infuriating:

"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia."

Interesting that the church should now cite psychologists and psychiatrists, fields for which I should think church leaders would happily have burned people at the stake not so very long ago.

And speaking of the church's present predicament in the quicksand of really revealed truth,

"This pathology is one that touches all categories of people, and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms..."

How disgusting. Here's yet another dismissal of the church's culpability by saying effectively that "priests are human too," as though this made the abuse of trust and power over defenseless children acceptable. No, it's always horrible and morally bankrupt but when done serially by a priest--the one person with a direct line to irrefutable, infallible moral guidance--it should be a capital crime.

I'm accustomed to hearing religious "leaders" hold forth as experts about matters of which they know absolutely nothing--indeed, matters of which nothing can possibly be known by anyone: what happens to the "soul" upon death, what their godhead's "plan" is, what behavior is or is not pleasing to the god figure, what "angels" can do, what things are the work of "the devil." But human sexuality is firmly in the purview of social and behavioral sciences. Ouija boards and tarot cards are of less-than-zero value in understanding human behavior. And I'm especially tired of ignorant, self-proclaimed "experts" telling me what is and is not a natural occurrence in our world. Especially when their proclamations seek to demonize others for the same crimes for which they themselves insist on immunity (and indeed traditionally have failed to acknowledge as crimes at all).

What irony that the sexual abuse of children is one field of which the church HAS demonstrated firsthand knowledge--a shameful, ignominious expertise. To paraphrase Lincoln, if we want to know about sexual behavior we should observe nature directly and face the subject pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Here's hoping this vile institution is irretrievably on its way to the dustbin of humanity's great mistakes.