in the name of god

The Catholic church is going to urge the one million Catholics in this state to campaign against gay marriage.

This is rather rich from an institution that has, with something bordering on religious fervour, harboured paedophiles for decades. The Church’s treatment of its student victims has been unchristian to say the least.

They have also run screaming from the findings of enquiries around the world which time and again revealed nearly all of its “homes” had a culture condoning physical, psychological and sexual abuse of their under-age charges.

Ten years after Australia’s enquiry, the Church’s leaders still have their backs turned on graduates of these homes in desperate need of counselling.

They now have the gall to insist “children are best nurtured by a mother and a father”. Given what they accept as heterosexual nurturing; as the best they expect from human beings; it’s difficult to imagine homosexual parents doing anything worse to children.

There must be a straw man to support every unsupportable argument, in this case we are warned “At this stage [the debate] is about same sex marriage, but next it might be polygamy”.

Ironic, really, that so many of the Catholic people I know [myself included] are gay themselves. More importantly, lapsed Catholics are all too often more likely to live up to those ideals the church’s leaders only pretend to value.

The Church may insist all it likes that marriage is all about the potential for reproduction, but even its own self-identifying members today have largely set that rotting apple to one side.  

Historically, the Church has always been as guilty of promoting evil as any other powerful organisation, if not more so. The past might be in the past, but it’s ludicrous of them to think tradition lends authority to any sort of argument.

The Catholic Church might not be the largest business in the world, but it is nonetheless a large franchise, with a branch in every capital city, and a bizarre reverence for wealth. If we look hard enough, this is just another desperate attempt for it to protect its market share. They may believe there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the average consumer does not buy poison. As for their claim they have one million members in Victoria – I simply don’t buy it. Many who self-identify as Catholic are not necessarily “practising” – some of us don’t need to.