Bad pope
Bonnie Erbe points out the largest flaw in the pope’s ‘horrifically ignorant statement’:
All the pontiff need do to acquire a more educated view of AIDS in Africa is to read the widespread literature about women and how they acquire the disease. The percentage of female AIDS patients who are prostitutes, or drug addicts, is dwarfed by the percentage who are married women living upstanding lives in their communities. The Pope advised them, according to the Reuters news agency, to exhibit, “correct behavior regarding one’s body.” Very helpful! That advice is completely useless to the typical “woman” in Africa who contracts the disease. Her profile is that of a teenage virgin sold into marriage against her will and “betrothed” to a much older man with many lovers who carries AIDS and refuses to use protection.
It’s that simple. It’s idiotic at best and malevolent at worst to operate on the assumption that all people who have sex have equal autonomy and control and decision-making power and right of refusal. It’s imbecilic to ignore the fact that many women simply do not have the ability to say no to sex with any particular AIDS-infected man, much less to prevent their husbands from having sex with other women and thus becoming infected. It’s simple-minded, wilfully blind, and hideously ruthless to condemn who knows how many wives and children to a horrible early death or orphanhood and destitution because of a pious and retarded loathing of condoms.
Joanna Bogle: part of the problem, not part of the solution.
http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/2009/03/18/condoms-and-aids/
This man is a lunatic, but then, anyone who knew Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Inquisition), must have known this. They wanted someone who would pedal backwards, and they got him. But what else could someone in that position be but an ignorant imbecile?
But he doesn’t have a loathing of condoms. He has a loathing of sex and women. So, what’s new? It is worth remembering that Pope John Paul II’s advisor on marriage and the family said that it would be better, if a husband was HIV positive and could not remain ‘continent’, to infect his wife, than to wear a condom, because there are things that are more valuable than life itself! And these turkeys are the ones who accuse others of creating a culture of death!!
And, remember, this is someone who speaks infallibly on matters of faith and morals!! Insufferable idiot!
As an aside, it’s interesting that Nicholas Beales speaks of misinterpretations of Christianity, whenever he would disagree, and yet considers the Roman Catholic Church to be one of the ‘true’ (along, be it remembered, with Pentecostalists and Evangelicals). Bedlam.
In other words, the position of the Pope is in every way in accordance with God’s character and Divine Will as portrayed in the texts the Church considers Holy.
Pfaugh! Someone find me a king to strangle with this worthless asshole’s entrails… (Jean Meslier was right!)
He said that?! When, where? I don’t think I knew that. Jesus Fucking Christ. So…there are things that are more valuable than life itself – so it’s better for a man to infect a woman and any children she may subsequently have than it is for him to wear a condom; yet it’s also better to refuse abortion to a raped child because nothing is more valuable than the life of the foetus? That makes a lot of sense.
Well it does make a kind of sense, I suppose, but only if the church really does hate women more than anything else, and apparently it does.
I’ve found a source – which cites as its source “Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: p298” – which I should have read but haven’t. Is that where you know it from, Eric?
It might have been, for I have that reference too, but the reference I was thinking of was Ranke-Heinemann’s Putting Away Childish Things, p. 294. JP II himself said, on 12 November 1988, that “even for people infected with AIDS or for those who want to use condoms to prevent AIDS [the Church’s moral doctrine] allows no exceptions. This sort of rejection of the Church’s teaching makes the cross void.” The pope’s spokesman for family affairs’ remarks follow this. Well, once a pope has said, he’s said it, after all!
Yeah, the first source had JP saying it too, at a Papal Jamboree on Family Life and Other Jokes or some such thing – but I figured Ratz was his speechwriter or something.
These people – these men – are so fathomlessly disgusting…They must know what happens to the children of people with AIDS in Africa – and how many of them there are – and yet they go on. Just yesterday. That miserable rotten fucking bastard.
I can’t help wondering whether, given the authority this person wields over so many millions, his statements could be interpreted as having crossed the border into the legally criminal.
On checking further, I notice that one commenter over at Pharyngula (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/the_pope_is_an_evil_quack.php) has the same thought, even mentioning the Hague as the venue for the doing of justice.
That’s a thought. That’s an interesting thought.
Maybe I’ll email the people at the Center for Inquiry – some of them are lawyers.
Stewart, I had the exact same thought. Medical advice is a tricky thing, after all. You can be held liable for holding yourself up as an authority and then giving bad medical advice. Why should religious leaders be exempt from this?
Actually I initially thought of this in the context of priests telling battered women to stay with their abusers. If a priest does this, and the abuser subsequently murders his wife, why doesn’t her family have a wrongful death action against the priest or the Church? The priest dispensed psychological advice from a position of authority, after all, and he had plenty of reason to think his advice would be lethal. How many women and children have died because of these priests? Or otherwise suffered violence? If that happened to my mother I’d want to sue.
Even the most self-centred white supremacist among us must be able to appreciate that Ratzinger isn’t merely throwing his full weight behind what is arguably a disguised genocide of black Africans, he’s also helping to ensure that the containment of AIDS worldwide, which theoretically could affect any one of us, regardless of age, ethnicity or sexual orientation, is dealt a very severe blow.
If he were a doctor, surely he could be done for malpractice. But he’s doing far worse without being one. You can always get a second medical opinion if you don’t like or trust the first. But this is someone whose followers are commanded to believe him to be literally infallible, on any subject he chooses to pontificate about (my, how did that word happen to slip in?), quite apart from believing that not doing what he says will condemn them to an eternity of suffering far worse than a drawn-out fatal disease or the creation of any number of widows, widowers and orphans. And the perpetrator either knows he’s lying to his subjects in a way liable to cause fatalities on an astronomical scale, or he knows that he’s dared to lay down the law for them without bothering to make himself aware of the medical facts and statistics. Imagine what kind of fiend all would agree we were dealing with here – if only he weren’t protected by the magical cloak of religious faith. If the agenda admitted it was man-made. What secular ideology has ever wreaked such mayhem (and with such ease, one might add)?
If it ever got beyond the stage of “an interesting thought,” the one thing that would set it apart from most other cases is how out-in-the-open all the evidence is. Ratzigate, anyone?
Just consciously realised what had been bothering me about Ratzinger, apart from the obvious stuff that should be bothering everyone.
It seems to me he had three main options. The best one, short of admitting that Catholicism isn’t what it claims to be, would have been to look squarely at the AIDS situation and permit condoms, at least as an emergency measure. Justification would be no object; they’ve always been able to justify whatever they felt like, so how about justifying something that saves lives and isn’t nasty for a change? If he said Christ appeared to him and said condoms were ok till AIDS is eradicated, would the reaction have to be that he’s no longer infallible? And if he thought it would be, wouldn’t the chance to save so many lives be worth the risk?
If he couldn’t do that, he could also have admitted that condoms are the best preventive measure and that not using them raises your chances of infection and death quite inordinately, but that they’re nonetheless forbidden. You want faith? Fine, live by it and die by it, but even the person forbidding you protection is telling you your odds if you keep on obeying him. Disgusting in a way, but at least partially honest and who said having a religion has to mean having it easy with no sacrifices?
So what did he do instead of either of those? Lied through his teeth about risks and consequences, in order to make sure that a) more of his potential followers are conceived, regardless of the death toll among those already born, and; b) he does not lose his claim to control of humanity’s most uncontrollable urge, thus enslaving all followers to him by virtue of their guilt (which, just to be on the safe side, he keeps insisting they had inherited to start with anyway).
It was always bad, but somehow it seems far worse when one contemplates the very real alternative options this frighteningly powerful mortal has at his disposal and which he chooses not to use, to the detriment (to the point of death) of those far weaker than himself.
Daniel Cohn Bendit agrees with you, Stewart (and so do a lot of other people, from what I can see).
‘Daniel Cohn Bendit…told French radio simply, “We’ve had enough of this pope.” He went on to describe Benedict’s remarks as “close to premeditated murder.’
The BBC’s religious affairs correspondent, on the other hand, defends him. It’s enough to make you sick.
Totally OT, actually, but earlier in the evening I happened to be on the phone with a friend who’s an ex-student flatmate of Cohn Bendit, but it’s OT because Ratzinger’s name didn’t come up. Still, it is heartening that this is not being taken lying down.
Power idiotizes. Nietzsche.