The new health law is causing Catholic campuses to deny necessary aid to women.

“But Catholic organizations are resisting the rule, saying it would force them to violate their beliefs and finance behavior that betrays Catholic teachings.

Catholic intransigence to prescribing birth control pills is a treasonous violation of an individual’s freedom protected under the constitution. Under the guise of religious freedom fascist Catholics (theofascists) would impose their beliefs on other nonCatholics. As John Irvingbrilliantly writes

“When you legislate personal belief, you’re in violation of freedom of religion. The Catholic Church may espouse its opinion on abortion to the members of its congregation. But they are in violation of separation of church and state when they try to proselytize their abortion politics on people who are not Catholics.”

Freedom of religion does not allow you to diminish the freedom of others.

If your bible says to treat your slaves well that does not mean you can have slaves.

If your bible says men who rape women have to marry them that does not make it so.

If your biblical commentary says your rabbi must circumcise male children and kiss their penis that does not mean you should.

Whatever heinous and ludicrous abuse you wish to impose within your group may fall within tolerance. But when you universalize your religious tenets to everyone your totalitarianism hits a constitutional wall.

If you choose to provide a public service then you agree to abide by the laws and mores of the public. Your religion may require nudity but you cannot be nude in a public store or space nor require it of your patrons. You can create a private club and then insist your patrons be nude but no more.

Our laws are clear on freedom. Flouting religious tolerance to enable your abuse is an obvious ploy to elevate the status of Christianity over everyone and is rightly called theofascism. Christianity is but one religion. No matter how you may think you are the chosen people, no matter what covenant you have taken with a hell fire god, you cannot torture the rest of us freely. Only the constitution has jurisdiction over all people, period.

The papal insubordination and whining over their inability to impose private and particular beliefs on all is treasonous. They flagrantly wish to overthrow our government and create their own. They are traitors to this country and should be treated as such.

I am tired of witnessing this blatant usurpation of American congress and constitution. If you wish a monarchy of theology, return to your Vatican island, where it is already entrenched. The Italians may allow your fascism but it is  not American. Your Catholic indulgence-avoiding, priest-abused Protestants fled to this country because the old world was not pure enough and then as a tyrannizing minority you hit the wall of the Bill of Rights the founding fathers wisely included, so you could not exert your puritanical terrorism on all people.

When you tread on American soil you agree to abide by US laws and constitution. Whether Christian or Muslim or any ilk.

There is no law that allows any of us to impose our religion on others. We are not free to murder, maim, exclude, or harm others for any religious reasons.

You may indeed bring your sick and perverse ideas to the market for consideration but they cannot be made law until they have followed democratic process clearly outlined in the constitution and its bills.

Indeed, even your inculcated members may not abridge certain rights of other individual members. Just because someone is born into, belongs to, or agrees to hurtful and idiotic religious practices does not mean they have lost their rights as US citizens.

You cannot raise children in closets. You cannot castrate your members. You cannot witness child abuse without reporting it.

No one regardless, without exception, has the right to impose their deepest, sincerest, most soulful religion onto others by force.

You can speak and march your vitriolic vile whether it is Nazi hatred or Christian castigation to hell but you cannot make others follow you in the public square or the private sphere. It must be voluntary and it must be clear that it is not torture or harmful inculcation. You are not allowed to cripple your children so they cannot participate in society. No matter if your God swears damnation for you and all people unless you do.

If your religion requires you to be a soldier of god, to wield arms against heretics, apostates, and mere unbelievers then you are a foreign enemy on home territory and guilty of war and terrorism against the US. You are no different than another country that has crossed borders, in the dark of night or the light of day, to attack us.

When you force your religion on others you do indeed terrorize the citizens and as such should be punished to the full extent of the law. That your god made you do it is no excuse whatsoever.

Tolerance is not enforced passivity on the behalf of others so you may make them yours. You should be ashamed by your bad behavior. You should be sent home tail between your legs.

Every time you refuse to prescribe a birth control pill, every time you refuse a woman an abortion, every time you insist others behave like you or go to hell or not receive salvation and force them to comply by your actions you should be sent home or if the damage is great sent to jail.

If by refusing to prescribe abortion pills a woman dies, say from an ovarian cyst, preventable by hormone treatment, the doctor should be liable for both the medical treatment and that woman’s grief.

If a woman is refused the day-after pill in a public pharmacy and she has a child, the pharmacist should be made responsible for the care of that child throughout its life.

Yes, you say you want to enforce consequences then live by that sword you so easily thrash about without due and kind consideration.

How horrible the world would be if we all based our public good in personal belief. How ridiculous religion looks when we acknowledge that every person has a religion of one called their philosophy, their world view, and then insist that all others need bow before it. It is more horrible when like-minded fanatics band together and impose their wicked ways on the rest of us under the excuse and guise of religion.

Shame, shame, that theofascists would terrorize me and my fellow citizens and then try and get away with it whining religious tolerance.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

www.frontiersofreason.com

Rick Perry has left the field. Thank goodness. After having Santorum win Iowa with a 34 vote margin in a state that doesn’t allow recounts and probably can’t count them right in the first place. But then it’s all about state rights, Perry is history. Remember Virginia where they wouldn’t put candidates on the ballet having lack of sufficient, validated petition signatures?

It seemed like the GOP would soften and go for Romney but in fact they didn’t, or I should say haven’t yet. Louise, my spouse, had been warning me about Santorum and I refused to believe that such a kook would ever be able to effectively run.

It only shows how incredibly desperate the GOP is. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since more people believe the rapture is near than go out and vote. Hell, more people read the Left Behind series than go out and vote–at least that’s what it would seem here in the backwaters of West Virginia where even the squirrels attend church. I suppose it takes a hellfire, brimstone, family candidate to stir up enough interest to go prove them elitist, snobbish, expensive-coffee drinkers wrong. Everyone knows we’re the righteous travelers to heaven and the rest of you be damned.

So I thought to myself, who’s crazier, Perry or Santorum. Almost by definition Santorum had to be now because Perry dropped out but I typed in ”Rick Perry Crazy” and hit search.  I wanted to prove that Perry had been too crazy to even be considered, kind of like Harold Camping, the Michigan Pastor who after being wrong several times still insists he knows the exact date when the streets will flow with blood and the righteous shall ascend.

Why not? The GOP has not been in such a disarray and confused about who to nominate since, since, I don’t know when…hmm…since Kennedy was assassinated; Johnson was promoting his great society and Barry Goldwater from Arizona was shaking conservative trees while espousing religious tolerance and endearing himself to corporate types. No good pubcon wants a tolerant believer in office.

Johnson won in 1964 with 61% of the vote. The widest margin since 1820 and the sixth most lopsided election ever, the fifth most popular margin. No election since has been so lopsided. My grandfather could hardly pass a day without cursing Johnson, without slang, as he saved that for niggers, wops, kikes,and jeuws; though he respected jews they worked harder than anyone else and he was mindful of my sour looks as my dad was a jew though I never met him. I wrote three letters to President Johnson and Ladybird which earned his ultimate respect–but they weren’t castigations.

Johnson portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist and Goldwater couldn’t get support from the real extremists. He was too soft. He actually got support form deep south Democrats. The same ones that would, when they came to their senses, become Republicans. And those gentile southern ladies who charmed with hospitality decided the Democratic party was anathema for helping the poor by using public money. After all as the bible says “there will always be the poor”. Who needs social welfare programs if humans are such sinners that there will always be the poor. Get a job, go to church, and mind your manners!

This kicked the seat of the modern conservative movement ushered in by William F Buckley Jr, an intelligent, eloquent but crazy bastard, who in 1955 started the National Review with:

“It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government (the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side. The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.”

Buckley described his faith by saying, “I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith.” Once again proving you are the faith you are raised in and and it has nothing to do with any content of the faith itself.

In any case, still suffering from the war of yankee aggression who on south earth would want big government to come down and tell them those black boys could date their gals. Hell they couldn’t even socialize with them even if they did attend their church, which they shouldn’t, couldn’t. Everybody, and I mean everybody went to church. Lack of attendance was the worst sin of all. By this rule secularists were pure evil and really quite suddenly school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality became the rallying call of the modern conservative movement.

In 1973 Michael Harrington, coined the term neoconservative against the policy ideas of Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol. But it would be Kristol who would become the godfather and would abandon his New York Secular Jewish friends like Irving Howe and other New York intellectuals discussing socialism in the sixties, after their intellectual fathers had bashed Stalinism in the 30’s and 40’s as leftists, for being too argumentative against tradition. A departure well described in the documentary “Arguing the World”. Neocons were leftists who abandoned their friends for reality. Kristol is famous for saying a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Clearly the mugger clipped Kristol’s head before taking the money and running.

Kristol a classicist, anti-utopian, and believer of “persuasion” and not ideology objected to welfare programs, international “revolution” through nation-building/militarily imposed “democracy” and application of Fabian Socialism/Keynesianism models.

And so here we are today looking up “perry crazy” and wondering how the even more crazy Santorum is looking good to pubcons. What? I see link after link of Perry bringing home a dead baby for a day and an interview where the host gawffs and then has to retract his lack of manners concerning their privacy.

Puhllleeeze, you mean the Perry who brings faith into politics and has no qualms telling the rest of us we’re going to hell because our private belief is wrong and lying, telling us we’re going to hell in the public square is the moral thing to do.

Even worse that he and his ilk hide behind the bible saying they are not judging but knowing damned well that no one can read the bible and not get that you’re going to hell unless you believe the word of God. Isn’t that what evangelism is all about? You are going to hell unless you believe the bible is the word of God and you go through Christ!

I find this far more offensive than bringing a dead baby home. Hell, he could have cannibalized it and I’d be less offended. Grossed out but not offended. Aside from legal considerations, bury it in the yard, mummify it and keep it in the  bedroom, stuff it for the sofa, bronze it and put it on the shelf but keep your damned faith out of politics and out of my house!

If you are motivated by your perverse faith, fine. Tell me you think abortion is wrong because a couple cells are a person but don’t tell me God told you a soul became the instant that sperm broke the cell wall and that’s why you vote like a fool. It’s just not politically moral that I hear it. It’s private. Go take your religious pornography elsewhere.

Too much, this is too much. I can’t even go on to the next search on “santorum  crazy”. I have to have some coffee and take a walk-jog.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Bits and pieces excerpted from President Obama’s 2006 speech, on faith and religion, are floating around recently. It is worth reading in its entirety. It is a full discussion of his gripes about liberals, conservatives, and their inability to come together based on faith; how and when does a person interject their religion or not into politics. Here is the entire most-quoted section in his “Call for Renewal”:

“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This paragraph is slammed as renouncing bringing faith into politics. Religious folks do not want to consider whether their politics are good for everyone. It is as if they want Kant’s categorical imperative to be the realm of personal choice: “I believe the bible and so should everyone else and if I can’t make everyone believe the bible everything I believe in because of the bible should also be believed by all.” By this standard any personal choice could be universalized as insistence: I believe everyone should read Darwin and let’s make it law. Darwin is certainly more relevant than the bible. If I were stranded on a desert island I would bring Russell’s History of Western  Philosophy and only because I don’t know of a more comprehensive single volume history; perhaps for you it would be Shakespeare or the Engineer’s Handbook, maybe a guide to rural technology?

“Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

Unfortunately these pretty words are an assertion and not a description. By hesitating to use the word pluralism in the previous paragraph he missteps and by the time he gets to the second it’s too late. Obama misses a huge political framing. Pluralism is not liberal. Pluralism is constitutionally conservative.

“Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.”

We weren’t a democracy until indentured servants, slaves, and finally women in 1920 were given the vote. Democracies are by definition pluralistic. Pluralism does not even require democracy. Obama is supporting the secularist James Madison, and it would have been nice had he noted this. Madison feared factionalism and wrote such in Federalist paper #10.  A faction is:

“a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Madison defines the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues such as what regime or religion should be preferred.

Furthermore from Madison:

“the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” … ”A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party.”

Dang, Madison sounds like a materialist, Marxist even. From Wikipedia:

Madison particularly emphasizes that economic stratification prevents everyone from sharing the same opinion. Madison concludes that the damage caused by faction can be limited only by controlling its effects.

He then argues that the only problem comes from majority factions because the principle of popular sovereignty should prevent minority factions from gaining power. Madison offers two ways to check majority factions: prevent the “existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time” or render a majority faction unable to act.

Republic and minority rights. Obama’s point on pluralism would more fairly be aimed at representatives who’s job it is to mediate the self interest of the voter. In the following statement he should be saying he would rather have representatives, grounded in morality and ethics.

“In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.”

“But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Whew, did your head spin? Mine did. He tries to mollify this contrasting approach, of a religious citizen and a secular representative,  by appealing to what John Rawls in the major point of his rewrite of A Theory of Justice  Political Liberalism calls overlapping consensus.

“Thus, to repeat, the problem of political liberalism is to work out a political conception of political justice for a (liberal) constitutional democratic regime that a plurality of reasonable doctrines, both religious and nonreligious, liberal and non liberal, may endorse for the right reasons…

“Yet the outcome of the vote is to be seen as reasonable provided all citizens of a reasonable just constitutional regime sincerely vote in accordance with the idea of public reason…

“Some may, of course, reject a decision, as Catholics may reject a decision to grant a right to abortion. They may present an argument in public reason for denying it and fail to win a majority. But they need not exercise the right of abortion in their own case. They can recognize the right as belonging to legitimate law and there fore do not resist it with force. To do that would be unreasonable:… That the Church’s nonpublic reason requires its members to follow its doctrines is perfectly consistent with their honoring public reason.”

Obama seems to be trying to forward this without calling it liberal, or more accurately constitutionally conservative, but ends up not recognizing that most pubcons wish to change the country period to promote their own cause and are unwilling to stop until there is a theocracy founded not in reason but biblical authority. It’s almost like he has to chastise secularists to make it look like he is beating everyone equally. Pubcons must shed some of their absolutism at the door and secularists can’t expect them to do so.

“Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not just “I,” resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.”

In a way I think this is cowardly and in another way I see him desperate to get mutually hating people to come together. Really, the Koran does list Jesus as a prophet. Really, the Mormons do believe Christ was a prophet. Really, the old, Jewish testament did predestine Christ’s sermon on the mount. Really, the Thetans of Scientology are the sins of humanity. It is appealing to try to cut through the Gordian knot of life-defining differences with the sameness sword but at some point you just can’t. The most egregious act is not secularist but theocratic. Secularism is the house and theology is the guest.

Obama then decides he needs to bash progressives a bit and support minority, democratic political input by saying how religious folks are self-correcting as if atheists and agnostics were not the real movers and shakers of change–bet the founding fathers, white-boy plantation owners, are rolling in their graves having given up fortunes to help develop a country in which they believed with all of their pocket books as travels absentia and war ruined them. In a republic it is the job of our politicians to moderate these interests as secularists in office; that it may be our wish that citizens could be informed enough for a direct democracy but they also may not or even wish not. Of course, when a representative votes or speaks as a citizen they can vote or blather for whatever they want. While pretending to chastise conservatives he actually goes for secularists.

“While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

“For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it”

Once again he disses those late, great plantation owners who gave up their fortunes to support this great Republic. Religious freedom was  more in response against Episcopalianism which was legally mandatory and monarchical. Our founding citizens were most motivated by Calvinistic Presbyterianism which was the second most popular church in America at the time of the revolution and certainly the most activist of them all.

“Only the Presbyterian Church lined up solidly behind the colonists, and without them independence would not have been possible. Oh, and that Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson? It came along a full year after Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote their own declaration of independence. The Mecklenburg Declaration, written on May 20, 1775, “by unanimous resolution declared the people free and independent, and that all laws and commissions from the king were henceforth null and void.”

I really want to believe in Obama. I really want to think we elected him for a reason and not equal opportunity. He does a great speech for the most part and is intelligent and has been thwarted at every angle but he just can’t get religion right in spite of his notion he is an anthropologist studying religion.

“I was not raised in a religious household. For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. However, in her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology.

“On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.

Detachment? Do you see much detachment about religion? This is as hypocritical as saying he is not going to have a war on drugs and then condoning more arrests than ever before. In 2007 before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ Obama asked for evangelicals to abandon their faith-based principles by denying they were really, truly faith based.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and faith started being used to drive us apart,”

This is simply silly. Faith was used to bring people together against others, as a source of power. Exclusion is the other side of inclusion. In some cases it was against oppressors. In others it was to maintain status quo. In others to oppress. I find it difficult, if at all, to find examples where it was to bring everyone, and I mean everyone, together, unless they were willing to follow their particular faith universalized.

Even today in so called interfaith meetings, why is it not intrafaith, they do not even try to address secular issues, they are incomprehensible. Islam is about peace, my ass. Christians turn the other cheek, my ass. Jews seek solace in gentiles, my ass. That their exclusion is somehow divorced from their inner humanness has no evidence or ideology. This is as ridiculous as my 17 year old son exemplifying George Orwell’s deservedly paranoid fear by saying war is peace because you have to have war to have peace.

“Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.”

They are eager to fight not for division but principle of faith. Evangelicals truly believe you must go through Christ to get to heaven and the world would be a better place if everyone followed their faith to the letter. Without faith, chaos reigns, and the end is coming soon. Faith didn’t get hijacked, absolutism is the logical result of their faith.

“At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.”

“There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich.” “I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.

What? I appreciate rhetoric but the bible is so mishmoshed that, for example, abortion folks can use “thou shalt not kill” for fetuses but can also justify killing people being heretics, apostates, and fellow killers. Nevertheless, unless he wishes to discuss hermeneutics between the Greek testament and the Hebrew Pentateuch they are, for the most part, reading some bastard version of the King James. In any case any translation, devoid of hermeneutics, cannot deny the specific statements concerning slavery, gay bashing, and misogyny. I am not being facetious here. As a lawyer knowing the constitution is interpreted through legal precedence Obama shouldn’t demean a crowd by being folksy. Bush got away with it because he was a fool, a shrub. Obama should be too smart to role model folksiness.

The problem is while reading the same damned sacred text people won’t come to a coherent conclusion and it’s because it is a bad book. That is the entire issue. That is why Catholics don’t even read it as a whole and rely on a priest and pope to cherry pick phrases and extrapolate broadly–a dead baby is really saved because it shouldn’t have to remain in purgatory and so doesn’t have to really receive Christ. While I appreciate the postmodern aspect that every reading is a writing, and every interpretation is a misinterpretation, when it comes to bible talk this is the equivalent of saying those disagreeing aren’t good Christians. What arrogance. Of course they are reading the same version. I say get rid of the accursed book, as Jefferson hoped in 1821:

“that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago. This country which has given the world an example of physical liberty, owes to it that our moral emancipation too.”

Pubcons truly and deeply do believe in the covenant of the 10 commandments and truly and deeply believe that the abortion issue, the gay issue, and intelligent design issue cause the big problems like war, theft, and utter economic collapse. It is really simple to them. That’s why you don’t see pubcon intellectuals right now and why they are aggressively and openly anti intellectual. A cow can clearly follow the sacred text.

In their mind analysis, reason, and deep thought take away from the utterly simple and clear truths available to everyone. The purity and value of individual interpretation was not so much democratic as a deep belief that everyone should arrive at the same conclusion, if they follow the bible, and if you don’t we’ll make our own sect and try to universalize that. The rhetoric is done, the argument over, let the final judgement begin. That is why they are called fundamentalists, nuances and intelligence are as valuable as zits on a kid.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Tip to Darrel.

Story from The New Civil Rights Movement.

At first I thought this was just an update on the story I posted back in may of 2011.  However, this is a different pedophilia investigator.  It appears that every person that they assign this job is caught either with little kids or pictures of little kids.  How is that possible you ask?  Because, their entire system is corrupt.

Here is the new story…

The Catholic Church’s pedophilia investigator, in charge of child protection and interviewing adults who as children had been victims of pedophile priests today was jailed on pedophilia charges in England. 49-year old Christopher Jarvis, a married man with four children of his own, began serving his 12-month sentence after serving the Catholic Church for nine years in a dioscese that included 120 Catholic Churches. Jarvis admitted to the charges, which included possession of 4000 images of pre-pubescent boys, including several depicting sadism, child rape, and torture.

This is the guy the church hired to investigate priests!  It was only images but, someone had to make the photos.  So very sad.

“The revelations that the church hired a peadophile…

Not a real shock…

…in a key child protection role….

Again nothing new….

will add to the controversy surrounding the Roman Catholic Churc…

But will they change – NO!

The Daily Mail reported….

At the time of his arrest in March this year, Jarvis was leading an investigation into an historic sex abuse allegation at Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Devon.

He was arrested after uploading images of pre-pubescent boys on to the Ning social networking website.

Police officers who traced him to his home in Plymouth, Devon, found more than 4,000 child porn images, mainly of boys aged 10 to 12, on his church-supplied computer and a memory stick when they raided the house in Penrose Road.

The court heard that 4,389 images were found on the laptop and memory stick.

Simply awful…

… includes scenes of child rape, and…

… include scenes of torture and sadism.

The judge who sentenced Jarvis told him, “The people who confided in you of their own misery and abuse may well themselves be shocked and horrified that the person they were speaking to was, in his personal life, downloading images of children being abused in the same way.”

The Huffington Post adds,

“One diocese official says he was surprised to learn about Jarvis’ action…

Surprised?  Really?

…but stressed “this particular incident was not a systemic issue in the Roman Catholic Church.

More catholic self irony.  It is not “systemic” – yes it is!  For almost 2,000 years they could make up what ever they wanted and people would believe it.  This no longer works.

It is more about an individual who had got himself into a position of trust,” the BBC reports.”

He got himself, “into a position of trust,” – wrong again – you put him in that position.  They will never solve a problem that they don’t see.  It is not their fault – it is just some random guy who worked his way into their system.

This just days after Bill Donohue said that this problem was solved years ago and he is tired of the whining of rape victims.

But wait…. there’s more!

Earlier this month, The New Civil Rights Movement reported on the case of a 46-​year old unnamed priest in Salzgitter, Germany, who was arrested and indicted on 267 counts of child sexual abuse, involving at least three boys over a seven-​year period.

This was the story I reported in May.

In May, The New Civil Rights Movement reported on a priest, Father Riccardo Seppia, in the archdiocese of the top advisor to Pope Benedict XVI, who was arrested on pedophilia and drug charges in a drug and sex ring investigation. Charges against Seppia included a recorded cellphone conversation in which the 51-year old priest reportedly said, “I do not want 16-​year-​old boys but younger. Fourteen-​year-​olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues.”

The pope explains why they rape kids….

In a 2010 end-​of-​year, shocking Christmas statement to Cardinals and other Vatican officials, Pope Benedict XVI announced, “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” and added that paedophilia wasn’t even considered an “absolute evil.”

What?  So, if it is not “absolute evil” then they can do what ever they want?  This alone should be cause to shut down this gang of thugs.

How were we poor catholics to know it was a problem?  This was NEVER OK!  The fact that you thought it was proves that you have no moral compass.  If the church’s excuse is that they are no better than society they have already admitted defeat.  If they are no better than they just admitted that they are of no value!

It’s important to remember that this is the Pope who has declared that laws which legalize same-​sex marriage “contribute to the weakening of the principles of natural law,” and to “confusion about society’s values,” and claimed that same-​sex marriage “attacks” the “endangered species” that is mankind. Even before he was elected Pope, he knew of the pedophile priest sex abuse scandal, yet did not act.

This is also the same pope presiding over a Vatican that has said the Vatican was being treated like Holocaust victims, and blamed homosexuality and Jews on the Catholic Church’s international pedophilia scandal.

Every time they open their mouth something stupid and evil pours out.

via the catholic league.

Many Catholics that I have spoken to, including the clergy, have grown weary of those who claim they were victimized by a priest decades ago and are still not satisfied with the Church’s response.

Almost every thing he says drips with evil.  “Those who claim”?  what does that mean?  Did the church give up millions to kids that were not raped.  Whoa, the poor catholic church is being picked on!

No matter what the Church does—doling out millions, providing endless counseling and therapy, mandating training sessions for every employee to guard against abuse—it’s never enough.

Bill, when it stops and the rapists are removed, we can talk.

It’s time for some straight talk: these people don’t want to move on, and that’s because they have too much invested in maintaining their victim status.

Holy FUCK!  Talk about hanging on the a victim status…. Bill…. That is your job.  That is all you do.  You are a professional victim for the catholic church.  Check out this slime that came out of his mouth…

No institution, secular or religious, has a better record combating sexual abuse today than the Catholic Church

This man is walking self irony.

This video has been added to the Freethought Classic Videos collection.  Click on the link or the tab above with the same name.  Please check out the videos and let me know what else should be added!

via Opposing Views.

The catholic church is filled with evil people that have no heart.

The New York Daily News reports that the parade has a new route next year and that it might disrupt services at a Catholic church.

“You know, you don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism,” Cardinal Francis George said last week.

Gay activists were outraged and called for George’s resignation. Instead he defended his comparison, releasing a statement to the Chicago Tribune:

“Organizers [of the parade] invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church. One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.”

via TIME.

is post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Süddeutsche Zeitung.

VIENNA — There is open rebellion among the clergy of Austria’s Catholic Church. One highly placed man of the cloth has even warned about the risk of a coming schism as significant numbers of priests are refusing obedience to the Pope and bishops for the first time in memory.

Wow!  A split for the catholic church?

The 300-plus supporters of the so-called Priests’ Initiative have had enough of what they call the church’s “delaying” tactics, and they are advocating pushing ahead with policies that openly defy current practices. These include letting nonordained people lead religious services and deliver sermons; making communion available to divorced people who have remarried; allowing women to become priests and to take on important positions in the hierarchy; and letting priests carry out pastoral functions even if, in defiance of church rules, they have a wife and family.

Gasp!  A Family?  The horror!

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Vienna’s Archbishop and head of the Austrian Bishops’ Conference, has threatened the rebels with excommunication. Incidentally, those involved in the initiative are not only low-profile members of the clergy. Indeed, it is being led by Helmut Schüller — who was for many years vicar general of the archdiocese of Vienna and director of Caritas — and the cathedral pastor in the Carinthian diocese of Gurk.

Excommunication is for people that can think for themselves.  One of the worst crimes ever.  gOd does not want you to think.  If you do, he will vanish in a puff of smoke!

The issues that supporters of the initiative want addressed may be revolutionary, but they are by no means new: they constitute basic questions that have been around for a long time but have never been addressed by church officials.

The initiative’s supporters are demanding that parishes openly expose all things forbidden by the church hierarchy, thus putting a stop to hypocrisy and allowing authenticity of belief and community life to emerge. The appeal for “more honesty” made to the world’s youth by Pope Benedict XVI in Madrid last week left a sour taste in many mouths in Austria, where some say that honesty is a quality the church hierarchy has more of a tendency to punish than reward.

Open Pressure and Disobedience

Particularly affected are some 700 members of an association called Priester ohne Amt (Priests Without a Job) who wish in vain to practice their ministry because they have a wife and children and stand by them. Priests who break ties with loved ones, on the other hand, are allowed to continue working.

According to the initiative’s founder Schüller, only openly disobedient priests and pressure from both priests and laity can force the hierarchy to budge. Although the problems have been out there for decades, he says, the church keeps putting off doing anything about them. Schönborn stated that the critics would have to “give some thought to their path in the church” or face unavoidable consequences. On the other hand, Anton Zulehner, a priest who is one of the most respected pastoral theologians in Austria, believes that this time the church is not going to get away with diversionary tactics.

Twenty years ago, Austria, nominally at least, was 85% Catholic. Today, in the city of Vienna, Catholics account for less than half the population while rural parishes are melting away. Various scandals have rocked the Catholic Church in Austria, among them child-abuse charges against former Vienna Archbishop Hans-Hermann Groër and the nomination of a series of reactionary priests to the rank of bishop.

Read the original story in German.

via CNN.

“Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration, whose bright lights hide the mystery of God’s humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity,” the pope said after recalling the story of Christmas. “Let us ask the Lord to help us see through the superficial glitter of this season, and to discover behind it the child in the stable in Bethlehem, so as to find true joy and true light.”

Do as I say – not as I do!

The 84-year-old pope, presiding over his seventh mass as pontiff, also conjured up an image of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, explaining that visitors must bend down to enter its low opening, drawing a tie to what followers of Christ must do to find their faith.

“If we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our ‘enlightened’ reason,” he said. “… In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped.”

If the only way to find god is by giving up reason – you can keep you sky daddy.