Author: Ophelia Benson

We’ve encountered Archbishop Timothy Dolan before. He wrote a blog post about the Catholic church’s way with those sexy little children who keep seducing its dear innocent priests, or rather about the world’s harsh attitude to the church’s way with the tiny little harlots.

What causes us Catholics to bristle is not only the latest revelations of sickening sexual abuse by priests, and blindness on the part of some who wrongly reassigned them — such stories, unending though they appear to be, are fair enough, — but also that the sexual abuse of minors is presented as a tragedy unique to the Church alone.

Italics his. Self-pity and moral obtuseness also his.

Now he’s pitying himself over gay marriage and how like North Korea it is.

Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea.  In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law.  There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.

And then they can force everybody to live according to the new definition of “marriage,” so if they say “marriage” is between a priest and a map of Akron, Ohio, then all priests have to marry maps of Akron, Ohio forthwith. It’s so unfair.

But back on planet earth, the archbishop sets about explaining to us what marriage actually is – which seems silly, since he is professionally sworn to have nothing to do with the thing, while millions of other people have actual experience of it, so why pick him to explain it? Who knows, but anyway, he does.

Marriage is not simply a mechanism for delivering benefits:  It is the union of a man and a woman in a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children.

So true, except for the fact that it isn’t. It isn’t necessarily to procreate children, it isn’t necessarily permanent, it isn’t even necessarily loving. 0 for 3.

But never mind; he knows what he means.

Yes, I admit, I come at this as a believer, who, along with other citizens of a diversity of creeds believe that God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago.  We believers worry not only about what this new intrusion will do to our common good, but also that we will be coerced to violate our deepest beliefs to accommodate the newest state decree.

Meaning…what? Nothing, except that he and people like him won’t be allowed to take their revenge on gay couples. That’s all – that’s what “violating their deepest beliefs” amounts to. It doesn’t mean they’ll be forced to do anything (except shock-horror perform a marriage if that happens to be their job), it just means they won’t be allowed to persecute people.

(If you think this paranoia, just ask believers in Canada and England what’s going on there to justify our apprehensions.)

That they’re not being allowed to take their revenge on gay couples and, if they have jobs that involve performing marriages, they have to do that for gay couples.

Hateful man, hateful church, hateful “beliefs.” A pox on all of them.

Update: I got this partly wrong, because the Guardian article is at least misleading.

Oh.my.god. I didn’t know about this.

Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: “Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary.”

Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.

They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. “I did what I was told,” she recalls.

And they infected her with syphilis.

It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

Jeezis!

What is there to say?

Oh honestly. Not good enough.

Ten years ago, the BBC was always telling us how bloody marvellous the euro was. Now – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s assisted suicide.

Really? Can’t fathom? Well try harder.

It’s really not that difficult. Something is going to kill us – you, me, all of us. We don’t know what it will be. We do know it could be slow and horrible. We’re afraid of that. Some of us would like to know we (and others who want it) have the option of cutting it short; knowing that would relieve one of the fears.

Now can you fathom it? I’ll tell you what I can’t fathom: I can’t fathom why that’s so difficult to fathom. I also can’t fathom being flippant about it. This isn’t some joke or some bit of trivia; it’s something that threatens everyone.

When the Beeb is really keen on something, it enlists the support of a soft-Left celebrity to make its case – the most popular candidates being Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard, neither of whom can resist hauling themselves on to a bien pensant hobby horse.

What is bien pensant about it? What a ridiculous, callous, frivolous thing to say. I don’t see anything remotely bien pensant about it. Assisted suicide, trendy? I don’t think so. That’s about as convincing as Terry Eagleton (of all people!) calling Anthony Grayling “identikit Islington man.”

Damian Thompson ought to try thinking a bit more bien, if you ask me.

Oh I love it when people with an agenda accuse other people of bias.

A BBC film on assisted suicide was “biased”, critics have said.

Care Not Killing campaigners said Choosing to Die, which shows a British man with motor neurone disease dying, was “pro-assisted suicide propaganda loosely dressed up as a documentary”.

And the ex-Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir Ali, said it “glorified
suicide”.

…

The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said he wanted to see “much more emphasis put on supporting people in living, than assisting them in dying”.

Oh well then – ! If Care Not Killing campaigners and a bishop say it’s propaganda, well, they certainly are unimpeachable authorities on how to be free of bias, right? As of course is the Christian Institute.

The BBC is facing a storm of controversy after it aired Sir Terry Pratchett’s “very unbalanced” documentary on assisted suicide last night.

The Corporation has received hundreds of complaints about the programme, Choosing to Die, which went out on BBC2 at 9pm.

And critics, including the Bishop of Exeter, spoke out against the programme amid an accusation that it was “one-sided”.

Said the multi-sided Christian institute.

Reviewing the programme in The Guardian newspaper, Sam Wollaston described the clinic, which is operated by Dignitas, as: “Not a lovely chalet in the mountains, with meadows and edelweiss and the sound of cowbells, as you might hope for; but a strange blue prefab on a Zurich industrial site.”

Oh good point. Just what ill disabled people need: a long expensive taxi ride up to a mountain chalet as opposed to a comparatively short affordable trip to an urban building. Plus of course that’s so obviously a telling example of bias and propaganda, the fact that the BBC didn’t pretend Dignitas was in a pretty meadow.