'da Catholic Church.....is teh suck.

For all of you who don't know - I was raised Catholic (I know, how did I overcome...) - The best part about my parents getting divorced was that my mom didn't make me go to church anymore, so I ran kicking and screaming from the Catholic Church when I was 11 years old. (I'll digress about why I wanted out of that claustrophobic religion another time)

Anyway, in the same rancorous discussion discussed earlier - my classmate and I scratched the surface of Catholicism (My Scalian friend is Catholic...go figure.) - anyway we had the typical "I don't judge you b/c you're gay.....we are all sinners....resist the temptation" conversation. But at one point I said that I thought that the Catholic Church didn't serve a large number of its members very well, namely women & gays. To which he asked why I would want to change his church.....

Look - I don't really give a rat's ass about the Catholic Church as a Church and accordingly, I don't care what free-minded, free-willed people believe in....my concern is only implicated when those beliefs bleed into other areas of society and cause detrimental results.

So, this morning before I got out of bed - I was thinking about whether I had a good reason to why I wanted the Catholic Church to change.....and it turns out I do.

First and foremost - there are a lot of kids, gay kids in fact, who grow up Catholic - I know tons of them - and they don't choose to be Catholic - their parents choose to raise them Catholic. So they end up getting totally fucked over - they are taught that being gay is wrong & sex outside of marriage is a sin, etc. These kids didn't choose to be Catholic and yet the Church is doing a horrible disservice to those kids by subjecting them to their bigoted teachings. So that's one reason.

Secondly - in our society religion seems to be this 'trump card' - it shouldn't be, but it is....so the Church is training all of these people to believe a certain thing (Homosexuality is a sin, Life begins at conception, Abstinence, etc.) - and because it's cloaked in religion - it removes human intelligence and logic from important issues in public discourse. It would be fantastic if people could go to mass, come home and engage in an abortion-rights discussion separate from religion, but they seem to be unable to do so. So the result is that a large number of people attempt to deny the rights of others because the exercise of those rights don't comport to their religion. And here is where bumper stickers come in handy: If you don't like abortion, don't have one & If you don't like gay marriage, don't have one. Further, if one should ask a Conservative Catholic, "Why shouldn't we allow same-sex marriage?" the response one is likely to receive will somehow implicate the Bible or the more palatable "Judeo-Christian tradition".....but is that a substantive answer....I would argue no. This is the Church taking important human decisions out of the hands of the adherent individual and vesting them with Rome.

Lastly, the Church needs to stay out of politics - these media-hungry bishops that threaten to deny sacrament to politicians based on how they vote on a certain issues - they need to be reprimanded immediately. Those elected officials serve the people, not themselves and for the Church to implicate their personal faith in reaction to their official decisions...well that's shameful and anti-democratic.


The bottom-line is that I really couldn't care less about the religious beliefs that people choose to hold - I just want them to stop hurting others.