The RCC: Abetting Child Rapists, Attacking Women's Rights
I was pretty pissed off yesterday by the parade of liberal pundits who also happen to be Catholic flooding the airwaves to announce that Obama had bungled this contraception issue and that it could really hurt him with Catholics in the election.
Chris Matthews went on and on about the open letter from Catholic bishops that was read aloud in every Catholic church two weeks ago, a letter that decried the decision of the Obama administration on contraceptives. Question for Chris: how many of those bishops are women? Would the answer be zero?
EJ Dione went on and on about how much good the RCC has done through their charity work that is extended to non-Catholics as well. Question for EJ: does that give them to right to deny basic health care services to women?
Mark Shields went on and on about how without the Church, there would have been no civil rights movement for blacks. Question for Mark: does the good work the church did on civil rights in the past give them the excuse to attack civil rights of women today?
As a male, it's disappointing to hear fellow male liberals siding with a patriarchal, misogynistic organization like the RCC. Do they not realize that the perspective of the RCC on this issue is not in any sense a balanced perspective? Can they not take a step back from their own faith and see that the RCC is out of step not only with the general public but with the 98% of American Catholics who practice some form of birth control (and I'm not talking the rhythm method)?
Yes, the RCC flock are incredible hypocrites on this, practicing forms of birth control that their church denounces as immoral. But isn't that the whole point? That there's REALITY - which is the way that people actually live and believe - and then there's religion, which - by today's standards of what constitutes evidence - amounts to pretending that make believe is reality.
For centuries, the RCC was OK with abortion per se, because people like Aquinas preached that the fetus was a vegetable for the first 90 days of gestation, and that it didn't become fully human until the soul entered the body at the 90 day mark ("ensoulment"
. So aborting a fetus in the first three months - while not exactly encouraged - was not seen as "killing a baby." But the church changed its mind on that about 150 years ago.
Which reminds me that the church is all about changing its mind. Like when it recently decided that "limbo" didn't really exist after centuries of scaring the crap out of grieving parents that their dead children were floating around in a state of unrest that could be alleviated only through prayer and contributions to the church coffers.
So who can say that the church won't change their position on contraception tomorrow? They are, after all, merely men, and men making decisions and pronouncements based on the thoughts of other men (exclusively males), not through some imagined inspiration from some non-existent god. In the meanwhile, will women just have to suck it up and be denied their rights until the RCC realizes that they're wrong on this issue as well and belatedly changes their mind once again? How is that justice?
How damning is it of the RCC that they abetted child rapists for decades, protecting them by moving them from one parish to another, giving the rapists an opportunity to rape again and again and again without any apparent worry over what "the word of god" and church dogma thought about child rapists. Yet when it comes to issues of womens health, these same men go out of their way to deny these rights, citing their dogmatic, make believe mumbo jumbo as their cause celebre.
Somebody has their priorities wrong, and - sadly - having those priorities wrong is a very conscious choice that is being made for political reasons by a bunch of make-believe-pushing males who should have no say whatsoever in a woman's access to health care and/or her personal choices in the same.
Real lives of real women v make believe. Why are we even arguing about this?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Good post! 
Another obvious point of hypocrisy: The big guns in the RCC who get their robes in a twist over politicians who support abortion but cheer on politicians who are pro-death penalty. The male higher-ups in the church seem to be most passionate about controlling and crushing women and gays. But, then, religion's main purpose has always been to oppress and subjugate "the other."
