A short way with dissenters
Hey, why not ask the pope to host Point of Inquiry? He’s a reasonable guy – rational, thoughtful, fair-minded, generous, liberal.
The Pope confirmed today that he will make an official state visit to Britain this September – and immediately launched an attack on the Government’s plans to introduce stronger equality legislation for gay men and women. In the first official announcement from the Vatican that the head of the Roman Catholic Church will tour Britain, Pope Benedict XVI called on his bishops to continue campaigning against the Equality Bill which he said threatened religious freedom.
That’s nice, isn’t it? A German fella who’s the boss of a large church based in Rome is telling British bishops to campaign against equality legislation – because it’s really up to Ratzinger to decide what kind of laws the UK should have. Not to mention the whole business of making a big public show of resisting equality in the first place.
In a letter to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, many of whom are currently in Rome on an “ad limina” visit, Pope Benedict publicly criticised Britain’s equality legislation for the first time. “Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society,” he wrote. “Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”
Yes, there speaks the voice of the papacy and the church – the one that likes to deliver occasional announcements about the ‘natural law’ that dictates that women are different from men and had damn well better not forget it. Reactionary bastards.
In a separate warning to any bishop thinking of deviating from the Vatican’s lead on such controversial issues, Pope Benedict also reiterated the need for the Church to “speak with a united voice. In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises, it is important to recognise dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate,” he said. “It is the truth revealed through scripture and tradition and articulated by the Church’s Magisterium that sets us free.”
Yes indeed, and arbeit macht frei. There’s no freedom like the freedom of scripture and the Church’s Magisterium, so kindly recognize dissent for what it is and STFU.
“…a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises…”
You gotta feel for poor old popey, he can’t come right out and say that the heathen are revolting, now can he?
What an evil little man.
Yes, and it’s the next claim that really sticks in my gullet:
He is an evil little man. Dissent, disagreement – with whom, I wonder?! – or, to use the church’s word, ‘heresy’, is not a mature contributiion to a balanced debate. He’s the guy holding his end of the teeter-totter down. What does he mean by ‘balanced’?
Well, obviously, since he knows what is contained in the natural law, there is no other contribution, just his. He gets to rule everyone. Nice. A predecessor of his excommunicated the first Elizabeth, and absolved her subjects from their duty of loyalty. He’s telling the second Elizabeth and her government just who’s boss! Fascism, pure and simple. Who said he wasn’t a real Nazi?
So, a German who thinks he’s infallible is coming to sort us out. Again.
That “dissent” sentence is haunting me, for its sheer gall. An attempt to sound civilised while actually saying that nobody else has a right to their views.
I’m probably angrier than usual, because the latest child-abuse scandal is focused on Germany, where I live, and I just found out that one of the top offenders lives in my neighbourhood. 69 years old, unrepentant and denying any wrongdoing. Apparently, back in 1986, a victim attacked him with a knife and ending up killing himself.
I supposed if anyone is to lecture us on the virtues of chastity and the unimportance of material wealth, it might as well be filthy rich pedophiles.
If Popbitch is right then Ratzinger’s being a bit hypocritical about this.
The human rights stuff I mean, obviously.
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the Pope, but being German isn’t one of them.
I really wish there were somebody with a high profile who would stand up in public, preferably with Ben16 alongside, and say something along the lines of:
“The Pope is entitled to have and express his views. However that does not oblige us to agree with them. We can say with a high degree of confidence that his ideas about the nature of the universe are false.”
Is there anything in these comments by the pope which doesn’t come under the general heading of “being pope and doing popey things”? The authoritarianism, the assertion of infallibility, yadayada: isn’t that where being pope’s basically, like, at, man?
Though I do have a bug up my ass about the BBC quoting his crap about ‘against netural law’ in a headline as if it weren’t a thoroughly tendentious claim; but I figure in the end it sounds weird enough that nobody sensible will care.
No, Dave, quite right, this is all highly popey stuff – but in the US at least there has been a hell of a lot of respect-creep for popes lately (lately as in over the past couple of decades or so) and then Tony Blair did voluntarily with his eyes open as an adult join the Catholic church so I think it’s well worth pointing this crap out anyway. As you say – the BBC talks about him as if he were respectable.
‘In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed’
What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Our freedom (from what? To do what?) is grounded and guaranteed (in what way?) in the fact that I possess male genitalia and some people don’t (which is itself the important Catholic distinction of course; not that women are women, but that they aren’t men)?
Natural law balls. It’s quite simple Benny: gender and sexual reproduction are features of evolution (which you do actually accept), like blue eyes and male pattern baldness, and indeed homosexuality. Most animals have these features: some life forms don’t, but regardless there is no logical inference to be had from evolution as to the status of the genders or sexual orientation. Only a religious belief can bestow that kind of divisive anthropocentrism on a person.
‘It is the truth revealed through scripture and tradition and articulated by the Church’s Magisterium that sets us free’
In other words, ancient pre-science texts by assorted authors and the fact that people have mostly been too ill-educated or cowed into submission through history to challenge them, as interpreted by men with the mindset of the writers of said texts, are apparently a good guide for life. Hmmm.
There’s detail (though not actual argument) on all that in Vatican bumf from the last few decades. I know because I read some of it carefully for Does God Hate Women?. (Jeremy’s chore meanwhile was to read Karen Armstrong carefully. Which of us had the worse agony? Hard to say.)
Off-topic: thank you very much, OB, for the link to the Lisa Bauer article on your front page. It’s chilling and fascinating.
Hi Jenavir,
Thanks for your comment about my article! I’ve been reading your comments (as well as the rest of B&W) and they’re always quite interesting and thought-provoking.
Back on-topic: I wonder what the general UK attitude “on the street” is to the Pope’s visit. I know about the National Secular Society’s petition to make the Roman Catholic Church pay the estimated twenty-million-pound costs associated with it, but what does the populace at large think? I mean, given the long and rather unfriendly relationship between the Pope and the UK, it might seem a bit odd for them to be rolling out the red carpet for the guy!
I wish Gordon Brown would cancel the Pope’s state visit as retribution for his attempts to whip British MPs. If only the Presbyterians still hated the Pope as much as they used to.
Oh, they do, they do, but these days it’s not fashionable to point it out – did you know that last year the leader of the ‘Democratic Unionists’, Ian Paisley’s old mob who used to be reliably anti-popery, took over half a million pounds from the British taxpayer for being part of a ‘devolved administration’ that doesn’t even work? There are powerful incentives to pretend that it’s all smiley now.
Iris Robinson, wife of one of Ian Paisley’s lot, (who said, some while ago, something to the effect that homosexuals were an abomination) has just recently been allegedly caught up in a money and toy boy scandal — with the result that Peter Robinson, her husband, has had to momentarily step down. The kettle calling the pot black!
UK residents might want to be aware of this petition,
http://www.secularism.org.uk/petition-the-pm.html
I understand that because Vatican Theme Park is for some reason recognised as a sovereign state we will almost certainly have to stump up anyway, but making our opposition vocal is worth the minute it will take.
Marie-Therese: The ‘Democratic Unionists’ are full of bigots like Iris Robinson, and also of creationists. Abortion remains illegal in Norn Arn too.
A DUP politician opened a new (private) visitor centre at the Giant’s Causeway and gave a speech about how the hexagonal basalt columns are evidence for the world-wide deluge.
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Don: apparently Ben16’s visit will cost about 20 million pounds. A commenter at Pharyngula has offered to go in his stead for only 2 million.
When one thinks about it a daughter shares more genes with her father than a son does with his father.
For autosomes, it is 50% for each, but a daughter gets an ~1400 gene X chromosome from her father and mother while a son gets an ~90 gene Y from his father and an X from his mother.