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It would be the height of hypocrisy for the Catholic Church to ban gays from ordination, when it has been doing so on the sly for many years. This kind of discrimination is simply a stop-gap for trying to cover for the priest-scandal of recent years (and a number of young people abused were girls, so this reaction makes no sense.

The Catholic Church-indeed, all Christianity-has many institutional sins to answer for. In the 1990s the late Pope John Paul II wrote a book apologizing for the Church's historical oppression and persecution of many peoples, including Jews, Muslims, non-Christian natives, etc. All well and good, but one group was excluded: the Church's persecution of homosexuals.

Now let us be clear that the Roman Catholic Church NEVER burnt homosexuals at the stake or any of the other tortures associated with witches and heretics. Homosexuals were confined and urged to do penance and pray, but not killed. The first Christian monarch to make "buggery" punishable by death was King Henry VIII in the 16th century (it was not so easy being one of his wives, either!). Puritans later on DID put homosexuals to death, but not the Roman Catholic Church.

To cling to the passages in Leviticus that condemn homosexuality is not fidelity to Scripture, but an attempt to use a religious sanction for a purely sociological bigotry. If we were to be faithful to Leviticus, we would have to put to death everyone who reads their horoscope and women would have to stay in bed seven days after their periods, among other now socially-unacceptable lunacies. (In fact, if we are going to REALLY rely on Leviticus, we must advocate the death penalty for active homosexuals. Is anyone really going to go that far? If not-well, actually, the Chinese communists execute homosexuals, but I doubt Leviticus is their inspiration-then let's chuck the whole passage altogether.)

The Catholic Church, unlike many more reactionary Christian denominations, acknowledges that homosexual orientation is not something "taught" as the Freudians would hold by the absence of a strong father and the presence of an over- loving mother, but people are born with it. In such case, it is part of Natural Law. Now, if we posit that God designed Natural Law, then God has created homosexuality. Why? Perhaps as a form of population control; we know it exists in the animal kingdom. So, if we say God created it, then spoke to forbid its practice, we paint ourselves into a theological and moral corner. Four possible options exist:
1)We are picking a Biblical passage out of context to suit our own bigotries
2)God did not speak through the Bible at all
3)God did speak through the Bible and He's a sick, schizo-puppy
4)There is NO God at all and this is all just man-made nonsense.

There's no other way around it. Besides, we have had homosexual priests since forever, even as Hollywood during the 40s and 50s was largely run by homosexuals, but had an official stance of homophobia. It's just one more hypocrisy.

As for the child-danger charge, 90% of pedophiles-that's going after very young children, pederasty is going after teen-age adolescents-are heterosexual, married men, and their victims are their daughters, their daughter's friends, or girls in the age group of their daughters.

You wanna rethink that position against homosexual priests, or should we start slugging rocks at the corner fortune teller?

If Benedict XVI is cleaning house by getting rid of illogical beliefs like Limbo, why doesn't he go all the way and toss out the homophobia? It would make the Catholic Church a lot more credible to intellectually honest people.

Learn more about this author, Peter Beolingus.
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