Gay Priests? Ack, they might redecorate!

That gigantic baptismal font clashes with the stations of the cross and has got to go. Hello? The renaissance has been over for centuries.

I don't have news articles, but I saw a tagline from the Chronicle's RSS feed: "The Vatican may soon issue a document saying homosexuals should not be ordained as priests, but without clearly defining the term 'homosexual' or specifying how intrusively the church should look into the sexual background of seminary applicants, Vatican watchers and church officials said yesterday."

'Vatican watchers' might recall that the previous pope made a similar proposal in late 2001 or early 2002, but fell under a mountain of criticism. One of New York's firehouses was very close to the WTC and pretty much everyone there was killed on 9/11. Their chaplain was an openly gay catholic priest and was also killed. Firefighters were deeply moved by how heroic he was and at the time, they were pushing that he be considered for sainthood. Five years have to pass before a bishop can consider such claims. That gives people time to forget. And apparently they have forgotten, since the pope hasn't been forced to drop it this time.

When the current pope was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Holy Inquisition), they authored a document that was the definitive church document on gay issues. In it, they said that gay was not something you do, but rather something you are. Any attempt to ban "gay" priests is stepping away from this stance. If they ban celibate gay priests, they are acknowledging gay as an identity rather than an action. Their anti-gay argument are approaching inconsistency and falling apart.

Anti-gay reasoning draws largely from Natural Law Theory. God created nature and we can figure out his divine laws by watching nature. Some nature. Grazing animals, mostly. God doesn't want us to go around blindly killing for fun like some felines, nor eating our young, like rabbits when they're frightened. And are there gay animals? No! Well, except that there are a lot (although I understand the gay penguins at NYC Zoo broke up and one of them has taken up with a girl. Social pressures finally got to him. He always seemed too much like Anne Heche anyway. ahem.).

Then again, it could be that sex is only for procreation. Except that the rhythm method's explicit goal is non-procreative sex. And old and infertile people are allowed to get married and get busy. Furthermore, the Immaculate Conception (the conception of Mary without Original Sin) became a Holy Day of Obligation in order to help quell an anti-sex heresy creeping within the church. So, sex is good and it isn't always for making babies and animals do it with same sex mates, so the reason same sex mating is a sin is because . . .?

God apparently disapproves of the majority of human behavior according to religious conservatives. In their world, he must sorely regret having made us. Heck, even a good chunk of his angels turned against him. The problem with being perfect and creating other beings is that if you make them perfect too, they become rivals to you. So you have to make them imperfect. And then it's nothing but headaches as you're forced to toss them into hell. Stay out of the creation racket, that's my advice.

Tag: Celesteh