The big new news today, as opposed to news about topics we’ve been reading about for weeks, is that the Vatican has officially announced that Catholic bureaucrats will not “bless” same sex unions.
Still nothing on what they are doing about their long festering problem with child molesting priests. Anything to distract from their own hideous moral irresponsibility.
Some people fell for the papal PR when he made a few nice, meaningless comments about gay people several years ago, but of course he is as crusty and revanchist as all of his predecessors, including the one who cooperated actively with the Nazis. Good Christians have no problem with murderous regimes, but draw a sharp line when it comes to loving relationships that don’t meet their petty, arbitrary standards.
Since then, the Vatican has persisted in advocating discrimination against transgender persons, in its usual, philosophically incoherent manner. They thus contributed, in good Christian fashion, to the murder of transgender persons.
The Vatican, of course, is very strict about gender roles and appearances:
It was just historical accident that led the good Christians who founded the United States to add to their new Constitution immediately a set of rules including one prohibiting official religion and discrimination by the state on the basis of religious belief. Then, after the four year war that finally ended slavery in their functionally Christian republic, they also added a rule requiring all government under that Constitution to treat everyone equally, so the pope’s permission to discriminate capriciously within his authoritarian corporation has no legal effect in the United States. The Supreme Court decision prohibiting states from denying legal recognition to same sex marriages is still the law of the land. All existing same sex marriages are just as valid now as they were before the latest official Catholic effluvium on the topic.
No self respecting queer should have anything at all to do with any Christian institution anyway, least of all the Catholic Church, which led the way to hatred for Jews and queers after its establishment as the required religion of western Europe. The Protestant Reformation changed some aspects of Christian belief, but good Christians never let go of a scapegoat, so Protestants have continued beating up Jews and queers with abandon for the past nearly 600 years now.
The problem now is not any official effect of the Vatican’s hate statement, but the psychological effect on anyone who has the misfortune to be stuck with any emotional attachment to the Church. Hang out with queers for long and you will hear people describe themselves as “recovering Catholics.” It’s not clear that anyone ever recovers fully, but those are the lucky people, the ones whose emotional attachment to an abusive institution did not drive them to suicide.
Now, for the foreseeable future, any queer who still identifies as Catholic will live under this cloud of hatred and discrimination and be more likely to kill themselves. The blood of every queer who does kill themselves is on the hands of the supposedly celibate (don’t leave your children alone with any of them) old men who run the Church, including il pape.
But loyalty to their fairy tale deity is all that matters to them. Real humans can just die.