I’m not saying that our take on sex was healthy–we thought it was, but that isn’t the same thing at all–but looking back, at least we had our heads on straight about non-procreative sex and contraception. Hell, back then nobody even thought about panicking about whether a method of contraception was “abortifacient,” since we knew that contraception, by its very nature and by definition and by every measure possible, is not abortifacient. Our pastors preached–and I heard this many times–that humans had been told to “be fruitful and multiply,” and we very obviously had done exactly that, since our planet was fast approaching its capacity, so we could hold off if we wanted. Though my church friends were hugely alarmed that I took that teaching to heart and declined to have children because I didn’t want any, they really couldn’t argue with me doctrinally about it, which limited their scary interventions to lectures me about how meeeeeeeeean I was to my long-suffering, baby-rabies-infected husband Biff (who had known from the beginning of our association that I wasn’t having kids, and who’d chosen to marry me anyway) and how scared they were that I might choose to have an abortion should a pregnancy “just happen.” But not once can I remember a single instance of a single person I knew outside of the Catholic Church who tried to tell women that contraception wasn’t totally acceptable.
As those old cigarette ads say, you’ve come a long way, baby.
Now we’ve got ultra-conservative Tea Party wingnuts like Jerome Corsi trying to tell people that sex isn’t supposed to be for pleasure but rather for making babies, and that if people want pleasure they should “read a book.” And I’m sure you’ve heard about the equally-bizarre attempt by Ken Cuccinelli to literally ban all forms of sexual intercourse except the penis-in-vagina kind, especially oral sex. Rick Santorum, King Anal-Retentive himself, has made no secret of his opposition to anything that stops women from conceiving during sex.
And what’s really funny is that all of these men are Roman Catholics, according to their Wikipedia pages.
There was seriously a time when someone who said this kind of shit would have been simply laughed off stage by Republicans and fundagelicals alike. And yes, largely they are by rational and sane and loving people. But they are also taken seriously by way more people than either you or I would ever feel comfortable thinking about. Rick Santorum was a Senator who ran for President and who may well be flirting with the idea of doing it again, since clearly he’s not being humiliated enough in his bedroom as it is. Ken Cuccinelli damned near became governor of Virginia in 2013. Jerome Corsi is a prolific right-wing conspiracy-theorizing nut who’s written (largely debunked and utterly unreliable) books and blog posts on the super-popular Christian tabloid World Net Daily (which Mr. Santorum also writes for sometimes) about topics like the President’s country of birth and where he thinks crude oil really comes from.
It’s mind-blowing to me that anybody is listening to stuff like this. But they are, and a lot of those ears belong to–of all people–Protestants, who have embraced the Catholic Church leaders’ deep distrust of contraception and sex-for-pleasure. I went looking for some citations for y’all and decided to just say to hell with it on this one because there were too many results. Feel free to go look if you want. It’s getting late and I’m running out of fucks to give. Protestants–especially fundagelical ones–are devoting considerable digital time to the question of exactly which contraception their women will be allowed to use and just what sort of sex people should be allowed to have. And more and more often, they are not focusing on those unfortunate women who are still in their power to control, but women who aren’t even part of their religion.
When I survey the wreckage of modern Christianity in my country, I behold their downright prurient-sounding fascination with women’s genitals and sex lives, like collectively the pastors of America have all morphed into pre-teen boys. When Hobby Lobby’s fundagelical owners decided to fan themselves, get the vapors, reach for their smelling salts, and collapse onto their chaises longue over the idea of women having contraception that might, possibly, maybe, oh-so-rarely cause miscarriage, they didn’t bother to look closer to discover that no, actually, the contraception they’re so freaked out about doesn’t actually do that. They just charged ahead to deny women that coverage. It’s not hard to wonder if the real problem is that women using contraception are probably having sex for some reason other than to breed future minimum-wage workers for assholes like their narcissistic, controlling bosses.
In short, the difference between a hardline Catholic and a hardline Protestant used to be so night and day they might as well have been different species of humanoids. Not anymore. And I’ve got to wonder if both groups’ rabid desire to control women’s bodies came into alignment when the two groups got into the same bed over abortion. A lot of things changed when Protestants joined the Catholic fight against abortion access. Even now, Catholics and Protestants are hammering out ways to oppose bodily-ownership rights, and the two camps are burrowing further and further into the bedsheets. It would have been completely unthinkable a few decades ago.
I wonder if it could ever have happened if both groups weren’t facing a serious crisis of evaporating membership, credibility, power, and–most importantly–donations.
And now the leader of the church that put the “ex” into “sex”, Pope Francis, is coming to talk to my country’s most important legislators in September.
Pope Francis was definitely a good choice for the Catholic Church after ditching “God’s Rottweiler”, Emperor Palpatine Pope Benedict. Benedict looked downright evil, and his hardline image presided over the first ripples of one of the worst scandals in modern history: the long-running pedophilia scandal that even now still rocks the Church. When Catholics began voting with their feet and wallets in response to that scandal, as well they should have, the Church began to panic, one must imagine, which is when kinder, gentler Francis was brought on board in a near-unprecedented move to replace a living Pope. I heard rumors that Benedict was facing perhaps some sort of trouble over his possible role in the scandal, but whatever the cause for his retirement, Francis quickly began making clear that he wanted to do things differently.
But is he really?
Here’s just one big example of why I’m not buying into the Francis fangirling going on in my country.
Just this week, news emerged that over 100,000 pedophiliac images and photos were uncovered right in the middle of the Vatican, many courtesy of a predatory archbishop named Josef Wesolowski, who is accused of molesting children in several countries where he was assigned.
Francis might express a great deal of sadness over the children who were hurt by the clerics under his control, but it’s worth noting that his sadness does not extend to handing predators like this archbishop over to the proper authorities, or sending him to one of the countries where he committed his offenses to face trial. No. Indeed, this predator has been roaming the Vatican under house arrest. In fact, he was quietly recalled back to Rome after news of his offenses got out, so he wouldn’t face that prosecution. He’s been protected for years by Francis’ cronies. And Francis without a doubt would have known that Josef Wesolowski was being protected by those cronies, and seems very unlikely to do anything about it.
In fact, when he said in November of 2014 that he felt “compelled to personally take on all the evil which some priests — quite a few in number, obviously not compared to the number of all the priests — to personally ask for forgiveness for the damage they have done for having sexually abused children,” when he dedicated his time in office to “not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed,” I wonder if he was hoping desperately that nobody would notice that he, himself, Pope Francis the Cuddly, had personally been informed back in mid-2013, 18 months previously, that Josef Wesolowski was being accused of this abuse and that he, himself, Pope Francis the Weird, had either ordered or allowed to have ordered the child-rapist to return to Rome. He wasn’t even originally put under house arrest, but allowed to wander around Rome at will at first; it was only way after being defrocked that he finally got put under house arrest, and that only after a furious outcry that a child-rapist was enjoying such freedom.
And Josef Wesolowski is still in Rome, being fed, housed, clothed, shod, and entertained (though obviously not to his liking!) by Catholic authorities using the money–and interest therefrom–donated to the Catholic church by willfully-blind Catholic parishioners. I don’t know when he’ll actually face justice for what he has done; Catholic justice is glacial when it comes to disciplining a priest who diddles children. A female parochial-school teacher who gets pregnant after unapproved sex can expect to lose her job within one month of her Catholic employers finding out about it, but a child-rapist may die of old age before the children he raped will ever see justice for what he did.
Oh, but it gets worse. When those images of child pr0n were found in the Vatican, Josef Wesolowski was only one of the people involved. There were others. Pope Francis, who has been nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, has not commented on this news, but for all his progressive and hard stance against the predators in his organization, almost nobody has actually gone to the Vatican’s prison for their misdeeds, even though he’s openly said that he thinks based on “reliable data” that about 2% of the priests in the Roman Catholic Church are pedophiles.
The case of Josef Wesolowski alone makes me distrustful of Francis’ user-cuddly image. But I needn’t go that far. Want more reasons?
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