This is progress! Of course, I got the news from some Catholic site that’s bellyaching about it:
“When Catholic students enroll at Catholic universities, their faith should be strengthened,” said TFP Student Action director John Ritchie in a statement posted on the group’s website. “But unfortunately, their faith is often weakened by the presence of pro-homosexual clubs and immoral events.”
“Just like abortion, homosexual vice is part of the culture of death,” said Ritchie. “It should be opposed, not promoted.”
“The homosexual movement is careful to advance slowly to avoid pushback. ‘Dialogue,’ ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ are just tools to reach a final stage: sexual anarchy,” he said. “When you drop a frog into boiling water, it jumps right out. But when you put the same frog in lukewarm water and increase the temperature slowly, the frog cooks to death without reacting. So, we need to speak up in charity and truth before it’s too late.”
Boo hoo, and also, everything you say is a lie.
Catholic schools: Getting safer for LGBT students every day.
This is a supremely cool video, and it happens to have been made by a friend of mine.
Though we in the LGBT community run the gamut of belief and lack thereof, it’s so important that we have all of our different voices in play, speaking out in the ways we’re best suited for.
Check your mailboxes later this week, Minnesota Catholics, because your bishops are sending you a very special present!
More than 400,000 DVDs are being mailed to the homes of Minnesota Catholics on Wednesday, courtesy of Catholic bishops in the state who want to stop the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in its tracks.
The 18-minute DVD includes an appearance from St. Paul and Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt in which he says it is time for Minnesotans — not the “ruling elite” of legislators and judges — to vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Thirty-one states have passed such an amendment.
“It is the people themselves and not politicians or judges who should make this decision,” Nienstedt says on the DVD. “This is the only way to put the one man, one woman definition of marriage beyond the reach of the courts and politicians.”
How exciting! So, eighteen full minutes of movie time about hating gay people, sent by men in dresses, sounds like a lot of fun. Are there any problems with this plan?
“It’s an effort to have Catholics vote the way the bishops want them to vote, but by and large Catholic voters are well-educated and they are independent-minded,” said Brian McNeill, president of Dignity Twin Cities.
Educated?! Independent-minded?! GAH, that’s no good if you’re a religious leader trying to force your people to act a certain way. No good at all.
What can be said about this week that doesn’t involve either Christine O’Donnell or Lady Gaga? Very little, so let’s not try.
Lady Gaga went to the VMAs with soldiers discharged under DADT; then she carried it further by calling on her “Little Monsters” to call their Senators, so they did; then she taught everybody a civics lesson, explaining to an uninformed American public what a “filibuster” is; and then she talked directly to the Senate via a recorded video, and encouraged people to continue calling their Senators.
Music this week comes from Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, for two reasons: A. Sharon is awesome. If you like neo-soul/blues/whatever, and ladies with big voices, you will like Sharon. B. I’m going to see her live this weekend, and I’m giddy with anticipation. The songs we’ll start with are “How Long Do I Have To Wait For You?” and “Tell Me.” The first one has shown up in a Late Friday Random Ten before, and I try not to repeat things, but I don’t care, because I make the rules. So let’s listen to these two amazing songs, and then we’ll hit shuffle on the second one and see what the iTunes [which crashed this week, which caused me to have about three panic attacks as I rebuilt the library] does. More videos after the jump.
PZ Myers reposted a long, long list of quotes from Adolf Hitler, who Bill Donohue stupidly thinks was an atheist. Here are a couple of them, and then go over to Pharyngula for the rest:
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.”
[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]
“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]
Sounds like a major league atheist to me.
Yeah. That’s it.
Seriously, PZ’s list is HUGE. Hitler was no atheist. He was a committed man of Catholic Christian faith.
Um, Bill, weren’t there a hell of a lot of Catholics complicit in Hitlers crimes? And isn’t it stretching the truth beyond recognition to call Hitler an “atheist”?
The pope cited Hitler today, asking everyone to “reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century.” Immediately, the British Humanist Association got its back up, accusing the pope of “a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.”
The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.
Why should atheists today apologize for the crimes of others? At one level, it makes no sense: apologies should only be given by the guilty. But on the other hand, since the fanatically anti-Catholic secularists in Britain, and elsewhere, demand that the pope—who is entirely innocent of any misconduct—apologize for the sins of others, let the atheists take some of their own medicine and start apologizing for all the crimes committed in their name. It might prove alembic.
Honestly, no sane person would claim that it was the “atheism” of Hitler, Stalin and Mao that drove them to their crimes against humanity.
Sounds to me like somebody’s pissed off that his Church has such a soiled name around the world these days, for so many reasons. A lot of it is the child rape problem, which isn’t going to go away.
Oh well, this has been another edition of Words With Bill Donohue.
UPDATE: I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of fact checking this crap, but Joe Jervis did, so here you go:
As Donohue knows, Hitler was in fact a Catholic JUST LIKE BILL DONOHUE and sang in the choir at the Benedictine monastery he attended as a child.
Hitler publicly denounced atheism as inherently communist. “For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. We owe Providence humble gratitude for not allowing us to lose our battle against the misery of unemployment and for the salvation of the German peasant.”
The Catholic Hitler also denounced secular education. “Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.”
Joe also adds this picture of Bill Donohue’s Pope, for everybody’s viewing:
This video is why our anti-gay opponents should be (and are, by their increasingly hysterical behavior) panicked. In case any missed this story, Christine Judd was the dean and athletic director at Cathedral High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, for twelve years, until she was forced to resign for marrying her female partner.
In case you have not been made aware, I’m contributing here and there to a little website called Wonkette, and that is the title of my latest post there. So go read it.
Last week, the Archdiocese of Boston published a piece in its newspaper by college professor Michael Pakaluk which suggested that, among other reasons, gays shouldn’t be able to send their kids to Catholic schools because the writer was worried that children of gay couples would bring pornography to school, because gays have such a “pornographic” lifestyle or something:
The third reason is that it seemed a real danger that the boy being raised by the same-sex couple would bring to school something obscene or pornographic, or refer to such things in conversation, as they go along with the same-sex lifestyle, which–as not being related to procreation– is inherently eroticized and pornographic. He might expose other children to such things, as he might easily have encountered them in his household.
It was stupid thing to say, but his entire column was ridiculous, fearful, and not befitting a grown-up column in a newspaper without pop-up pictures or things to color. He’s retracting that part, but he really needs to retract the whole thing, because he’s also really scared of some gay couple who give pizza parties for his son’s class. (Horrors!)
My point in posting this is more entertaining, though, because one of my favorite websites is Lamebook, where people send in things that happen on Facebook that are disastrous, hilarious, stupid, etc., to record for perpetuity the best and worst things that go on on that website. They anonymize all the names, of course. Anyway, somebody named “Colin” posted an article about this on his wall, and his friend “Resa” won the entire interhoopty with her comment on the subject:
Exactly!
That being said, I’ll also add my name of the chorus of “my straight friends in middle school were the ones bringing porn to school, you numbskulls.”
Because Satan can only be so many places at once, you see.
“The devil tempts everyone — people in politics, in economics, in sport. And naturally, he tempts, above all, the religious leaders, so you shouldn’t be surprised if the devil tempts those in the Vatican. That’s his job.”
Father Gabriele Amorth isn’t speaking metaphorically when he says that. The 85-year-old priest means people can be tempted and literally possessed by Satan.
(…)
And as the chief exorcist of the Roman Catholic Church, it’s his job to expel the devil when someone is possessed. Amorth, the founder of the International Association of Exorcists, has performed more than 70,000 exorcisms in his career, he estimates.
But there is a difference between possession — where the devil takes hold of someone’s body and actions — and temptation, where Satan lures a person into doing evil, he said.
As a child abuse scandal sweeps across Europe, with accusations being made against priests in Ireland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, Amorth said the pedophiles are tempted, not possessed.
He has never done an exorcism on a child molester, he said.
“I have carried out exorcisms on some priests who had been molested by the devil,” he said, without going into details.
“But cases of pedophilia exorcised, no. … Pedophiles are not possessed by the devil, they are tempted by the devil,” he said.
Setting aside the utterly insane idea that people’s bodies are possessed or inhabited by invisible evil spirits for just a moment…
So, this exorcist (oh, to be paid throughout life for doing nothing) has done his monkey business on priests who have been “molested by the devil”?
I wasn’t aware the devil was into guys.
Any-hoo, I think it’s great that the Roman Catholic Church continues to talk about these things, because they just keep saying crazier and crazier things! And none of it is moving an inch toward exculpating the thugs! As far as I can see, it’s having the opposite effect, and each day and each new grotesque revelation are doing their part to continue chipping away at the moral authority of the Catholic Church, and the faster that happens, the better off the world will be.
