The Catholic Church should just stop offering sex tips or edicts for a century or two. Really, all credibility on sexual issues is gone, and their reactionary ignorant public policy endangers humanity’s long-term survival.
On a recent tour in Africa, Pope Benedict says that condoms were not the answer to Africa’s AIDS problem, and could make the problem worse. This is a sinful lie that will cause death to poor people.
Every time there is a big international conference on world population, the Catholic Church has been there and blocked birth control. If the Earth ends up an overpopulated hell, the Infallible Popes will be partially to blame.
An Inuit village in Alaska recently sued the church for sending a known pedophile priest to “serve” their community.
See, it’s a theme. The Catholic Church is unhealthy about sexual issues and needs to stop screwing up public policy.
The Church should either shut up, or get help and become healthy. The Catholic Church could hire a consulting team of modern experts in healthy sexual human behavoir and just adopt their recommendations. Seriously. We’ll forgive you. Just apologize and rebrand and join the 21st century. And pay the pedophile lawsuits by selling some of that land and billion dollars worth of silverware.
The Catholic Church has been unhealthy about sexual issues since they demanded priests couldn’t marry so that the church would inherit the property of the aristocratic brethren. This gambit worked, and the church is the world’s largest landowner. But it’s left an organization befouled by scandal.
As arcane as this history sounds, it affect real people’s lives. Just a few weeks ago, a friend went looking for condoms in Calcutta and couldn’t find them! She was trying to help a young India woman acquire them to protect her and her lover. She had to search high and low. They were very, very difficult to find and the pharmacist was reluctant to sell them to her because she was a woman. This is madness. Calcutta needs free condoms to be as common as cows in the street. All our environmental problems are made much more difficult by the surging growing of world population.
Calcutta is where Mother Teresa did such saintly work all the while supporting the Church’s sexual rules. Mother Teresa did great work helping the poor after they were already born and poor, but didn’t act to turn off the flood at the spigot. And that was immoral of Mother Teresa. It is immoral to force the world’s poor people to have babies they can’t support properly.
But hey, thanks for helping with the problem that you helped create.
The Pope insists on prudish lectures to the world about the ins and outs of doing it. As a monastic Catholic, the Pope probably gave up having sex with women many years ago, and so probably doesn’t have much experience with condoms. That’s OK. But don’t teach about what you don’t know. I wouldn’t never lecture people on the proper way to fix a car’s engine.
The Christian community has long been plagued by a false morality on sexual issues. By taking easy, high-horse stances on difficult issues, Christians side with the past, society and the powerful. But complex moral issues have two sides, and sometimes we need to pick the lesser of two evils. Premarital sex with condoms is better than unplanned pregnancy any day.
It is a false morality that stops contraception. It claims the moral high ground, but hurts the poor. The “stop condoms” approach seeks to prevent sex, but mostly harms the vulnerable. Stopping abortion may protect a living fetus, but robs women of reproductive rights that give them self-determination. Forcing young women to bear babies they don’t want is more immoral than abortion. In all these issues, the minor moral benefit of the prudish approach is outweighed by the harm caused to the innocent.
And when did ignorance of the human reproductive pipes become a sacred value? An unscientific willful ignorance is the enemy of a sustainable world civilization. We have fifty odd years of scientific research into sexuality to help us with these murky topics. No need to listen to the Pope on this issue.
Fundamentalists Christians have long postured as protectors of a prudish heterosexual hegemony. Jesus said “Don’t worry about the speck of sawdust in your neighbors eye when you have a log in your own eye.” We’ve got bigger fish to fry than people making love before marriage: planetary survival, global warming, overpopulation, AIDS, endless wars, outdated authoritarian secret societies.
I always marvel that Christians dig in on sexual issues as the outrages that they’ll get worked up about. Really, sex you don’t approve of. Not Guantanamo, or modern-day slavery, or famine caused by export crops, or the broken sky. Really, that’s the issue. I think they choose sex issues to jump on because it seems an easy to explain cultural issue and it doesn’t rock the pro-corporate boat.
Dear Catholic friends, I apologize for mocking things you hold sacred. I do it because you need it and we need you to regain your moral clarity for the healing of the world.
Planetary survival depends on family planning. That makes it moral. It is immoral for Catholic Church to kill the planet from overpopulation because of failure to adopt modern approaches to family planning. Maybe Catholic ‘family non-planning methods’ worked to refill the pews, but today, those methods are a danger to everyone.
Condoms should be a sacrament, as they honor life, health, responsibility, intelligence and care for the poor.
Maybe in a few years the Pope will be blessing cargo planes of condoms heading for Africa.
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