As far as I’m concerned, I’m glad the Catholic Church is being upfront with what has always been its dogma.  Thinking members will have to decide whether they stand by the Church or leave it.  And dogmatically, there isn’t a choice:  You can’t be a little bit Catholic.

Most religions propose a layout for Heaven and Hell that are fundamentally bigoted, and we usually let them slide for it because they keep it quiet.  Maybe not any more.

Anyone have the access and ability to check the original language on this one?

Transvestites? Really? Now what you WEAR does or doesn’t get you into heaven? Is there a dress code now, and are they going to share it, cause, really, have they checked out what the Pope and the Cardinals are wearing these days?

Does Mexican Spanish use the word transvestite the way American English does?

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that, in Matthew, at least, Jesus was pretty clear that the group with the fast track to hell was the people who treated their neighbors badly - the sick, the poor, the strangers, the hungry.
As in “I was gay, and this is the way you treated me.” That pesky “whatsoever you do” clause.

I really think that rich people are higher on Heaven’s bouncers’ list than transvestites, Your Eminence. But on both counts, check your own wardrobe, asshole.

No, Billingham, that is not dogma.

As for being “a little bit Catholic”?  That IS dogma.  Your conscience is primary.  That means no matter what shit even the Pope claims, the individual conscience is primary.  Only God knows, and only God decides who gets into heaven.

There are entire parishes devoted to being “a little bit Catholic”.  There are entire orders devoted to being Catholic in their own ways.

This is why liberal Catholics will stay: they love their Church and their parish and know the hierarchy is full of shit.  It’s co-dependent behavior, and it should stop, but it’s hard to make that stand when your own parish is “blameless” and full of loving people and Catholics for Choice and support groups for GLBTQI and otherwise helpful.  Sure other parishes can be “misguided” and the old men who run Rome are crazy, but why take that out on the good people of your parish?

What is happening is that Corrector-type pastors are being placed in the more liberal parishes.  The result is people leaving in droves and donations plummeting.  The hierarchy backed off for Faith, Hope & Charity in the suburbs up here b/c it’s the richest parish and they needed the money enough to give the Church (which is the people) what they wanted.

JPII stacked the Cardinals with just this type of hateful authoritarian, so I don’t see much hope for the hierarchy in the short to mid term.  They might not care if they lose most of the American church.

Why not just do everyone a favor and eliminate the New Testament?  After all, there doesn’t seem to be any room for all that tolerance and love, and leaving it in there is just a bait-and-switch.

Christianity, in many cases, seems to have evolved past the actual need for a “Christ”.  For too many, it’s “Up With Hate!” and “Down With Love!”.  Besides, love and tolerance are just for pussies, amirite?

Too bad you LGBTQ’s got caught in the crossfire, but, after all, dogma is far more important than actual human beings anyway.  Always was, always will be…

“...as long as they remained celibate and lived alone their entire lives.”

That sounds a lot like what priests do.  The clergy seems a good haven for homosexuals!

Hmm. But they are A Ok with the torture/rape/murder that went on in Ireland, with the children in their care. Gotta love it.

Do pedophiles go to heaven if they only molest children of the opposite sex?

Since Cardinal Barragan is so certain about our fate, has he given any thought to the destiny of the child-raping priests and the criminal enterprise of bishops and cardinals that shuttled them around to new environs to continue their pedophile activity?

They’ll all be forgiven by the church.  Duh.

I wonder if this transvestite rule is retroactive—I mean, does it adjust along with fashion trends?  Baby boys used to wear pink a century ago; blue was for girls.  Are they all roasting in the depths of the Slor now?  Smoking was considered effeminate for men for years.  When’s the cutoff date?  and what about all those cross-dressing foreigners with their robes and silks and whatnot?

Perhaps the good Cardinal would provide us with his own hellfire-avoiding fashion guide.  This shit is important.

@Lymis: It may be a translation error.  Looking at the Italian, it seems he meant “transexuals,” not “transvetites.”  Not that it makes any more sense that way.

Transvestites? Really? Now what you WEAR does or doesn’t get you into heaven?

Yeah, there’s something in the Old Testament (maybe Leviticus?) that says men shouldn’t wear women’s clothes and women shouldn’t wear men’s clothing.  It’s probably sandwiched between the rules about not wearing a mix of fabrics and women not entering certain places while menstruating.  This obscure rule is one reason why some non-Catholic extremist churches insist that women wear skirts and dresses rather than pants.

Can we go just one flipping week without an ignorant bigot eruption from one of Papa Ratzi’s boyz?

No.
This has been another edition of ....

How long will it take for the supply of altar boys/girls to dry up?  What parent would let their kid be alone with any priest after all this garbage?  Not me, that’s for sure.

All those guys in flowing colorful satin dresses with their coreographed ceremonies look like transvestites to me.

Yeah, why some priest in a skirt thinks god hates transvestites is beyond me

“why some priest in a skirt thinks god hates transvestites is beyond me “

Well, the Cardinal’s dress is a MANLY dress.  So its okay.

I wonder if this transvestite rule is retroactive—I mean, does it adjust along with fashion trends?  Baby boys used to wear pink a century ago; blue was for girls.  Are they all roasting in the depths of the Slor now?  Smoking was considered effeminate for men for years.  When’s the cutoff date?  and what about all those cross-dressing foreigners with their robes and silks and whatnot?

Short answer - yes.  Yes, it does adjust along with fashion trends. 

As catgirl pointed out, there’s a law in the Old Testament (yes, I do think it’s Leviticus) that forbids men from wearing women’s clothes and women from wearing men’s clothes, but it never specifies exactly what the clothes in question should be (“And the men shall wear only trousers of such a length that it shall reach their ankle, or their knee.  Behold: mid-calf length trousers worn by men are an abomination before the Lord”), which means that what’s really important is that each sex wear the clothing that has been identified with them.  It would be Bad for a man to wear a long dress, but clerical robes are okay because they’re male-identified, even though the actual difference between the two garments are pretty minor. 

In short, the actual garments are beside the point, as long as you’re dressed according the local standards of the Patriarchy.

Yawgmoth—someone who still believes in Skydaddy is pretty far into the denial already.

“What parent would let their kid be alone with any priest after all this garbage?”

Our priest would never do that!

Why not just do everyone a favor and eliminate the New Testament?  After all, there doesn’t seem to be any room for all that tolerance and love, and leaving it in there is just a bait-and-switch.

Because nothing says ‘tolerance and love’ like the Book of Revelation, am I right? The Whore of Babylon says hi.

Your implication that the good and decent part of the Big Book is the NT leads me to wonder if you’ve ever heard of Jews, and what exactly you must think of us.

Yeah, there’s something in the Old Testament (maybe Leviticus?) that says men shouldn’t wear women’s clothes and women shouldn’t wear men’s clothing.  It’s probably sandwiched between the rules about not wearing a mix of fabrics and women not entering certain places while menstruating.

Deuteronomy actually (22:5). And it’s between the rules about stray cattle and proper handling of fowl. Now the really odd thing is that Deut 22 ends, after some sick shit about the proper stoning of non-virgins, with the line (22:30):

A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor discover his father’s skirt.

Huh!?

And MikeEss, it blows my mind to have to point this out, but Saint Paul is not an Old Testament figure.

Would love to hear what they think should be done with hermaphrodites - damned if they do, damned if they don’’ or do they just excommunicate the parents and the medical personnel?

I apologize for this string of comments, but the old OT v. NT thing is a deeply infuriating trope that always rears its ignorant head in discussions like these, and I do have one more brief thing to say about it. The appropriate suggestion to make is, not that Christians dispense with the New Testament because they have failed to live up to it, but rather that they get their grubby hands off the Old Testament, because they have repeatedly proven themselves to be stunningly unable to understand the normal process of its interpretation, the context of its composition, or the complexities of its messages. As the pony macro says, not yours.

People do not usually suggest this, though, for whatever reason.

Sarcastro:

Young’s Literal has “A man doth not take his father’s wife, nor uncover his father’s skirt.”, which sounds vaguely like something to do with underwear, but then NASB has “A man shall not take his father’s wife so that he will not uncover his father’s skirt.” NIV has “A man is not to marry his father’s wife; he must not dishonor his father’s bed.”

What seems most likely to me is that “skirt” here means a woman’s undergarments or something generally similar, which makes me think this is yet another example of the blazing patriarchality evident throughout Christian scripture and tradition. But then I’m just some asshole heathen and certainly no scholar, so what do I know?

“Your implication that the good and decent part of the Big Book is the NT leads me to wonder if you’ve ever heard of Jews, and what exactly you must think of us.”

Not the quoted poster, but:  Well, I for one think that most of you have figured out the difference between personal religious devotion and civil law. And the difference between the “dash their heads against a stone” parts and the “let all living creatures praise the Lord” parts.

And that, by and large, the ones who haven’t are not the inmates running the asylum.

As soon as you start major national movements for Constitutional amendments banning pork and shrimp, though, I’m turning on you. Count on it.

Question #2: why do all these Jew-hating folks get so worked up about what it says in leviticus?

And I don’t see this whole “the head of my religious hierarchy does not speak for me” business, honestly. Even as a (thoroughly) former Catholic myself, I just don’t understand how that is supposed to work—I left the church precisely because I could not in good conscience reconcile my own understanding of morality with that being promulgated by the people who had responsibility for forming the doctrines my religion required me to follow. Given that that was what led me to renounce my baptism, I’m having a hard time understanding how people get to that point and then remain in the church.

At the same time, the image of stereotypical hard-line Jewish mothers putting the Rick Warrens of the world in their place in their own inimical style is delightful to contemplate.

So, wait?  A 60-year-old italian in a funny hat says that when you die, if you’ve done anything that makes him go “ew”, you don’t get into his magical fantasy cloud palace?

If only the Catholics would leave punishment to the invisible sky fairy rather than trying to do all the smiting themselves.  I honestly wouldn’t mind the bullshit so much if it was a bunch of bigots shouting from their rockers about how dirty dancing and white shoes after labor day will forever exile you from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Get your church out of my state, thank you.  Then you can say all the goofy shit you want.

You know that idea that homophobia is generally the projection of a closet case? I don’t entirely buy it—usually, those people have problems with everyone’s sexuality, including their own, so it’s a poor compass for whatever specific personal issues they’re running from.

That said, when someone says “Homosexuality is a choice,” chances are they mean their sexuality was a choice. They chose to turn their backs on what would have given them joy.  They chose to rationalize it by making that joy out to be a bad thing.

They chose to sleep alone—in Barragan’s case, all his life—when they could have been with someone. The old men of the RC church chose not to be someone’s lover, someone’s husband, maybe someone’s dad. They threw that all away.

To admit that homosexuality, and sexuality in general, aren’t sins, these alte kackers would have to admit to themselves that they made the wrong choice. They would have to contemplate how much of their lives, how much happiness, they trashed. 

Can you imagine the pain of that realization? In fairness to the Catholic hierarchy, in their shoes, would you have the strength to admit that you threw something so fine and important like it was nothing, that your most wrenching personal sacrifices were utterly pointless, that you destroyed what should have been the biggest part of your life?

This is what keeps the RCC in Crazy Town w/r/t sex. It’s not about how changing the rules would affect rank-and-file Catholics. It’s about how it would affect the rule-makers.

*******

Smoking was considered effeminate for men for years.  When’s the cutoff date?

Not smoking, per se. Cigarette smoking. General Grant and his cigars always looked perfectly butch, even to 19th century eyes. And the cut-off was WWI, when cigarettes were found to be easier to handle in the trenches than cigars and pipes. (The legend is that we also got tampons—which had previously been only used in surgical wounds—from some enterprising nurse working in a WWI field hospital. )

“And I don’t see this whole “the head of my religious hierarchy does not speak for me” business, honestly.”

Ummm… I’m an Ex-Catholic, too. I left the Church because of exactly the same experience ACG had - the hierarchy clearly and deliberately poisoned the local parish I went to.

The only reason that “the head of my religious hierarchy does not speak for me” doesn’t work is if you think that it is supposed to.

I went to church to have a relationship with God, not with the pope. As long as being a part of that community and that style of worship worked for that, I stayed. It never was a part of my beliefs that the Catholics had the monopoly on truth.

The pope and the hierarchy were WRONG. It didn’t keep me from identifying as Catholic.  I’m not sure why that’s so hard to believe. I felt that Bush and the Republicans were deeply wrong, and that the Democrats in Congress sure weren’t helping, but that never made me feel less of an American.

Why should having a wrongheaded pope be any different? When it became impossible to put up with what was happening locally, I walked. And haven’t looked back.

ACG @ 24 - Wow. Did you ever mention this (or forwarding that post, maybe) to Father Corrector?

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Personally, I’m waiting for THRCC to regress enough to buy up some papal indulgences before I die.

>blockquote> The pope and the hierarchy were WRONG. It didn’t keep me from identifying as Catholic.  I’m not sure why that’s so hard to believe. I felt that Bush and the Republicans were deeply wrong, and that the Democrats in Congress sure weren’t helping, but that never made me feel less of an American.

Why should having a wrongheaded pope be any different? When it became impossible to put up with what was happening locally, I walked. And haven’t looked back.
Comment #33: Lymis on 12/03 at 11:46 AM </blockquote>

Because, Lymis, America is a democracy and every American is pretty confident that in the next 2, 4, or 6 years, they get a voice in putting someone in place that more closely reflects and implements their views.  ANd has anyone seriously claimed that Presidents are infallible? Hint: we do have a process of impeachment.

The RCC has no such mechanisms.  Any change is top down, and that top is fully insulated from 51% of the population (women) and almost fully from those over age 25 or so.  (If you aren’t in seminary by then, you’re unlikely to be able to work your way to the top.) THe RCC rarely asks for input, when they do, it is often ignored (see the book “THE Pill”), when input is given unasked, one is quickly put in one’s place.  E.G. a Catholic neighbor of mine related how at a women’s meeting, the priest whose luxurious living quarters and massive performance space had been graciously supplied out of the congregations $, had the gall to tell them “this isn’t a democracy you, if you don’t like the way I run it, you can leave.”

I’ll be pushing back subtly, but pretty hard this holiday season on any of the youngsters still remaining in the church.

A happy, recovering Catholic of many decades.

That was “youngsters in my family,” BTW.

“And MikeEss, it blows my mind to have to point this out, but Saint Paul is not an Old Testament figure.”

True enough, and yes, Revelation is an unending delight for authoritarians more interested in the rod than the child.  (Though, to be fair, the inclusion of Revelation in the canon was very controversial, given that it was thought, probably correctly, that the proles would not be able to handle it…)

And yes, there is plenty of other rotten stuff in the NT.  However, the figure of Christ represents one of the few sympathetic, tolerant, and more than just fire-‘n-brimstone authority figures in the whole book.  The Old Testament seems much more a series of rules, and stories demonstrating the consequences of following or breaking those rules.  Love may be talked about, but it’s seldom demonstrated.  IMHO.

“Your implication that the good and decent part of the Big Book is the NT leads me to wonder if you’ve ever heard of Jews, and what exactly you must think of us.”

Jews don’t use the Old Testament as Christians do.  To Jews, the Tanakh is the primary religious text, with support from the Talmud (as non-Jew, this is what I understand).  To the extent that any belief in a deity or deities is acceptable, I accept that this is how Judaism is structured.  I feel the same about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, or any other religion.  I don’t “accept” any of them personally, but within reason, I support the rights of the followers of any religion to believe what they want, as long as people are not suffering as a result of those beliefs.  Let’s agree that the line between okay and not-okay is blurred and intelligent people can disagree

However, Christians are/should be centered on Christ and his actions/teachings, all of which are in the New Testament.  In fact, Christians believe much of the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament on many matters.  (If they didn’t believe so, they’d be little more than Jews represented with a different corporate logo.)  So when they violate the spirit of the book they claim to revere, as a former-Christian-who’s-now-an-Atheist, I feel I have every right to judge those people, especially authority figures, who do so.

If there’s any belief I follow, it’s that intolerance is intolerable…

Not smoking, per se. Cigarette smoking. General Grant and his cigars always looked perfectly butch, even to 19th century eyes. And the cut-off was WWI, when cigarettes were found to be easier to handle in the trenches than cigars and pipes.

Molly, NYC: True—no one batted an eye at men enjoying their pipes & cigars.  Cigarettes were considered uncouth for women and effeminate for men.  The turning point for cigarettes was a combination of WWI and a brilliant corporate PR stunt where a group of women lit up while marching in a NY parade (the story is in the book “Toxic Sludge is Good for You,” I’ll have to look up the details again).

Question #2: why do all these Jew-hating folks get so worked up about what it says in leviticus?

In my experience, the real Jew-haters like Leviticus just fine.  That’s the one that has the ancient tribal law against “man laying with man” that they like so much. 

Or are you calling catgirl and I Jew-hating folks for pointing out (in answer to Lymis and Sour Kraut’s questions) that the Bible does, in fact, contain ancient tribal laws against cross-dressing, albeit in a different book than we thought?

People do not usually suggest this, though, for whatever reason.

O those contrarian Cathars!

I find it truly funny, that a Mexican cardinal is issuing this. Hispanics have a long, long history of practical hypocrisy when it comes to following RCC edicts. You basically say one thing to your priest’s face and then turn around and do what is necessary. This works well for those who are cultural members that don’t really believe anything a church official has to say, but stay for the social support. For those who truly believe, it’s more problematic, yet a good number, whether it be LGBT’s,  couples outside of wedlock, women getting abortions, etc., still manage to do what’s necessary to live their lives.

Are we as progressives paying too much attention to declarations of policy from the RCC? I think we need to find out what members on the ground are really doing before bothering to react. It may be that ignoring these official pronouncements just might be better, and stop giving the church so much publicity. This was one of the things that used to bother me about MS magazine—the obsession with whatever the RCC was doing. Maybe, we should just ignore the pronouncements and make sure we have support groups in place to get around the nonsense. French, Italian and Spanish women have always done this.

Let the old white men die away and the RCC disappear by attrition.

I forgot to add that I hate the Dutch too…

Comment #9: BABH on 12/03 at 09:53 AM

@Lymis: It may be a translation error.  Looking at the Italian, it seems he meant “transexuals,” not “transvetites.” Not that it makes any more sense that way.

I’m all but certain it’s a translation error.  The Italian text says “trans e omosessuali,” which sure looks like one of those derivational prefix coordination constructions (e.g., “pre- and post-surgical”).  The best English rendering, therefore, should be “trans- and homo-sexuals.”

Now I go to an Episcopal church.

When I was growing up in the Episcopal church, clergy and parishioners told jokes about the Episcopal church being “Catholic Lite,” or that people raised catholic grow up to be Episcopalians while people raised episcopalian grow up to be Atheists. I thought they were just regional jokes but I grew up and realized they weren’t.

@ ACG:

If you are anywhere near a large-ish city, your local college may have a non-denominational choir.  Enjoy it or even join it.  Much of their repertoire will be Catholic in origin. After suffering with the screeching of our local church organist for years, hearing the non-denom actually made me a fan of classical and baroque. The UCC has the social/spiritual aspect covered. ANd congrats to you for refusing to be complicit in your churches actions.

It just makes me angry and sad.

ACG really summarizes a lot of what I was going to say.  Being raised a liberal Catholic has informed who I am, but I just can’t do it anymore.

One thing that might help explain how people can remain Catholic while disagreeing:  For many Catholics, being Catholic is less about intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, and more about doing the rituals of worship.  The concept of religion and belief as intellectual assent is a super-European-Protestant one.  Sometimes you do things just because that’s what you do, because that’s how the world works, not because you intellectually assent to a set of quasi-logical principles behind the rituals. 

This seems ridiculous and stupid from a rationalist perspective, I know.  But it accurately describes how religion/faith/belief work for people of all sorts of different religions—and it accurately describes my experience of being Catholic.  More poetry than catechism, so even if I think 90% of what’s in the catechism is stupid and wrong, the poetry still rings true on some deep level.

But I’m enough of a rationalist—I’m a scientist, FFS—that the continued insistence on doctrines and dogma that I think are not only wrong, but offensive, cruel, and hateful—makes the poetry hollow and insincere.  That’s why I can’t do it anymore.  But I can understand how some Catholics can.

I think more people are familiar with the concept of being culturally Jewish.  It’s obviously not the same experience, but it has some parallels.  You do some rituals for the ritual, because it’s who you are, because it’s what you do at this time of year, even if you don’t intellectually believe in all the laws.

I recommend the book Liberating Rites: Understanding Transformative Ritual if you want to learn more about this perspective.  Despite the woo-woo-sounding title it’s from a scholarly, secular perspective.

The legend is that we also got tampons—which had previously been only used in surgical wounds—from some enterprising nurse working in a WWI field hospital.

Not true.  Tampon-equivalents made of various materials were used at least as far back as the Egyptians (they used disposable softened papyrus), and pads date back to at least the 4th century.  Disposable pads and tampons were available in the US in the 19th century.

The modern tampon design did derive from the battlefield, but in the 19th century: the French developed the device to insert into bullet wounds to stop the bleeding, and the civilian application was quickly adopted (and the reverse: tampons have been used as emergency field dressings to the present day).

#42 LCforevah,

I wasn’t the Catholics “on the ground” who hijacked health care reform and lobbied for the Stupak-Pitts amendment.  It was the council of Catholic Bishops.  So no, we are not paying too much attention to these proclamations.  The Catholic church has power and the only way I can see to combat that is to call out their bigotry whenever possible.  As you can see from numerous posts, it is this kind of thing that is driving me and others away from the church.

And don’t forget the early “branding” that goes on - with infant baptism and Catholic schools - corporations hired psychologists to figure this out - the church has been doing it for centuries.

homosexuals and transvestites will never enter into the reign of God

Is that a promise?  Because that’s a great selling point for being gay and/or crossdressing.  We should use that in our recruitment literature.

Comment #48: snowmentality on 12/03 at 01:08 PM

One thing that might help explain how people can remain Catholic while disagreeing:  For many Catholics, being Catholic is less about intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, and more about doing the rituals of worship.  The concept of religion and belief as intellectual assent is a super-European-Protestant one.  Sometimes you do things just because that’s what you do, because that’s how the world works, not because you intellectually assent to a set of quasi-logical principles behind the rituals.

This seems ridiculous and stupid from a rationalist perspective, I know.  But it accurately describes how religion/faith/belief work for people of all sorts of different religions—and it accurately describes my experience of being Catholic.  More poetry than catechism, so even if I think 90% of what’s in the catechism is stupid and wrong, the poetry still rings true on some deep level.

I think there’s another thing going on here with a lot of Catholics, who see the Church hierarchy as very corrupt, yet still believe it is the “true” church, the one that was founded by Jesus and his apostles, and the one that God wants people to be in.

This is a very old idea, BTW.  It’s right in the Decameron, in the story of Abraham and Jehannot.  Jehannot (a Christian merchant in Paris) tries to convince his friend Abraham (a Jew) to become Christian.  Abraham decides to go to Rome to see the virtue of the Pope and the cardinals to make up his mind whether the Church is led by righteous people.  Jehannot then privately despairs and tries to convince him otherwise, because he knows that if Abraham goes to Rome he would see the behavior of the clergy there, which is anything but righteous.  Abraham insists on going to Rome, goes, and sees exactly what Jehannot expects: great evil and sin.  Then he comes back to Paris and converts to Christianity, because he concludes, and here I paraphrase: “Damn, your leadership is so fucked up, that the only way your Church could have survived for so long and continue to grow is that it must truly have God’s guidance.”

So yeah, Catholics have been doing this for over 650 years.

What seems most likely to me is that “skirt” here means a woman’s undergarments or something generally similar, which makes me think this is yet another example of the blazing patriarchality evident throughout Christian scripture and tradition.

It looks like it’s even hinkier than that. Quick research tells me that the phrase means one should not behold one’s father’s nakedness. The skirt in question being a male undergarment of that era. Not so much blazing patriarchality (spellcheck swears that’s not a word, but it should be) as it is a case of raging insecurity methinks.

I’m not sure about the Hebrews but I do know the ancient Greeks and Romans considered trousers to be effeminate. So by the early church-founders’ lights the vast majority of us modern males are flaming drag queens.

It’s perfectly sound Christian doctrine. No need to go to the Old Testament, it’s right there in Romans.

Yahweh hates gays. And the sooner the GLBT community finds better gods, the better off they’ll be emotionally.

#50 carovee, interference with our government means that the RCC needs to be sued—that isn’t a pronouncement—it’s bad faith(!) and illegal behavior. I would rather ignore the declarations and bring legal recourse when it’s warranted.

I haven’t been catholic for a long time, to the point that a lot of this just doesn’t affect me emotionally anymore. As a secular citizen of the US, this institution really needs to be brought to heel, as the church fathers as such dogs(!) for interfering in government.

Calling out the bigotry isn’t enough. These dogs don’t care what we think, we need to hit them in the pocketbook constantly.

“It’s perfectly sound Christian doctrine. No need to go to the Old Testament, it’s right there in Romans.
Yahweh hates gays.”

Ummm… not so much. Yahweh needs better PR folks who are able to translate ancient documents. Just about nothing in the New Testament actually says anything negative about same-sex behavior that isn’t specifically related to idol worship.

Except the place where God got ticked off at a bunch of straight people who weren’t paying enough attention and made them gay and lesbian. That’ll teach ‘em.

spellcheck swears that’s not a word, but it should be

It is; more specifically, it’s a word your spell-checker (and mine) hadn’t encountered before, and in a language so well supplied with bastardized Greek and Latin roots and affixes, a perfectly reasonable word like ‘patriarchality’ has every bit as much right to exist as an atrocity like ‘disestablish’.

People who argue that it’s only a word if it’s widely used, or if it appears in a dictionary, forget to consider how words get to be widely used or recorded in dictionaries in the first place—somebody has to invent them, after all. And for every one neologism that does make it into a dictionary, there’s a thousand that don’t, and ten thousand that don’t need to because they’re stuck together from bits out of the lexical equivalent of the spare parts bin—because that’s how language, or at least this language, works. In this case, I wanted to say ‘the state or condition of being patriarchal in nature’, but I needed to do it in a single word so’s not to completely destroy the coherence of what I was saying. In English as we use it, ‘patriarchality’ is that single word. That my spell-checker doesn’t recognize it is not a sign that I shouldn’t be using it, but rather that my spell-checker is insufficiently well-read.

Sorry, I’m really not getting at you, and I apologize if I’m being rude and too careless to recognize it; but I’ve taken a lot of shit, off and on, from people who treat dictionaries as one step down from Scripture, and I consequently like to get in a shot at that kind of attitude wherever the opportunity presents itself. (Especially since none of those people are now deciding my grades.)

a case of raging insecurity

Didn’t Noah have the same problem, or at least God on Noah’s behalf? I mean, Ham saw Noah naked, and he and his line were cursed forever; Shem and Japheth covered their fathers nakedness—without, you’ll note, specifically without looking upon him unclothed, and they were literally lauded to the high heavens. From the direction of the story’s emphasis, I’d say that the sin in question must’ve been the looking-at-your-father naked part, and I’m interested in the apparent suggestion that the patriarchality* of that culture extended so far that raping** one’s mother and seeing one’s father naked are (apparently) considered equal sins.

* :D
** I’m assuming that sense of ‘take’ on the basis that the author of the text almost certainly isn’t interested in dealing with any possibility of willingness on her part.

Except the place where God got ticked off at a bunch of straight people who weren’t paying enough attention and made them gay and lesbian. That’ll teach ‘em.

Now, see, that’s a throwaway line that just begs for at least a paragraph or two more on the subject. Pretty please? I mean, I can think of a couple maybe candidates, but I’m really curious to hear what it is you’re referring to.

(Or I suppose I could’ve just said ‘patriarchal nature’ instead of ‘patriarchality’ earlier. But where would be the fun in that?)

Aaron, I’m guessing that since it speaks of “your father’s wife” not “your mother”, the verse is meant to include stepmothers in forbidden territory, as part of respecting dad’s privacy, as opposed to a simple prohibition of incest.

Oh, okay. That makes a lot more sense than what I said.