...but they actively hate the Catholic Church.
I observed this correlation on a Philosophy forum where I noticed the correlation between "atheist" and "anti-catholic" and "people with peculiar personal habits that the Catholic Church defines as sinful."
Exhibit "A" as to the correlation of the first two categories is this screed from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation that calls on liberal and nominal Catholics to leave the Church because it has, you know, moral teachings that do not conform to the way she thinks the world should work.
It's nothing new - adherents to the Latest Great Thing have been making this pitch for the last two thousand years. In fact Ms. Gaylor's screed is nothing more than a warmed-over pitch made by the Nazis about the Catholic Church's reactionary resistance to permitting the State to get involved in the Very Best Secular Medical Policies, which in 1930s Germany was euthanizing the disabled.
And we all know how that worked out, don't we?
Let's look at Ms. Gaylor's shallow diatribe:
Dear 'Liberal' Catholic:
It’s time to quit the Roman Catholic Church.
Well, certainly, freedom of conscience, adherence to the truth and all that. No one is making anyone stay.
It's your moment of truth. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on, anyway?
Because, obviously, prior to three weeks ago, we were living in the Dark Ages, when women were sold like chattel and forcibly made to have sex, get pregnant and bear children.
The nightmare world of January of 2012, before the Obama HHS Mandate.
It is time to make known your dissent from the Catholic Church, in light of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ ruthless campaign endangering the right to contraception. If you're part of the Catholic Church, you're part of the problem.
Jeez, hysterical much?
The Bishop's ruthless campaign consists of (a) supporting Obamacare (stupid idea) and (b) arguing for a conscience exemption (good idea.)
I remember when liberals were big on "freedom of conscience." They would get together in these big herds and whinny about how wrong it was to make people sign "loyalty oaths" promising that they woudln't support a violent revolution against the United States.
And remember burning the flag and putting a crucifix in urine? That was the most important thing once upon a time.
But Catholics adhering to a teaching that you can find continuously taught from the First Century, that isn't nearly as important as giving Stalinists the right to become teachers.
Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club?
Can't have a reasoned conversation without a bunch of name-calling, can we?
Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers?
"Crusade to ban"?
Where? When?
Evidence please.
And "to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers?"
Huh? The Catholic Church doesn't teach that people have to exercise prudence in determining whether and when to become parents? It seems it does.
It's like this woman doesn't know what she's talking about.
When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church's antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.
Think of what "acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths" can be laid at the door of the Catholic Church when it stands in the way of "retroactive abortion" and defines the soon to be widespread practice of murdering children one year old or younger - who really aren't people, to some folks - the test balloon for which is now being floated by the Journal of Medical Ethics.
A backer of the Roman Catholic presidential candidate says that if women want to avoid pregnancy we should put an aspirin between our knees? Catholic politicians are urging that the right to contraception should be left up to states? Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court upheld contraception as a privacy right, we’re going to have to defend this basic freedom all over again?
All she can say is "Jew! Jew! Jew!" (In other words, Catholic-baiting instead of Jew-baiting.)
But, seriously, guilt by association much?
Also, evidence please for the buried claim that the "Roman Catholic presidential candidate" has ever said he intends to lobby for outlawing contraception?
There isn't any.
So its back to yelling "Jew! Jew! Jew!"
You’re better than your church. So why? Why continue to attend Mass? Tithe? Why dutifully sacrifice to send your children to parochial schools so they can be brainwashed into the next generation of myrmidons (and, potentially, become the next Church victims)? For that matter, why have you put up with an institution that won’t put up with women priests, that excludes half of humanity?
No, liberal Catholics, send your kids to a secular school where they can become "myrmidoms" for the liberal welfare state and be molested by public school teachers, which is far, far more likely than facing a similar issue with a Catholic priest in that (a) the rate of molestation by Catholic priests was always lower than any other occupation and (b) is far, far lower than any other institution today because, unlike, say, public schools, the Catholic Church has been required to reform itself.
No self-respecting feminist, civil libertarian or progressive should cling to the Catholic faith.
Actually, no self-respecting Catholic would be a feminist, civil libertarian or progressive insofar as those terms have been defined to means "secular deniers of God who make the murder of people the summum bonum of society."
As a Cafeteria Catholic, you chuck out the stale doctrine and moldy decrees of your religion, but keep patronizing the establishment that menaces public health by serving rotten offerings.
"Stale," "moldy" and "rotten," but it "menaces public health."
Hey, the Jew-baiting analogy just got clearer, except the Nazis would have thrown in "diseased" and "poison" somewhere.
Keep working on it!
Your continuing Catholic membership, as a "liberal," casts a veneer of respectability upon an irrational sect determined to blow out the Enlightenment and threaten liberty for women worldwide. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.
Interestingly, this one comes right out of the Liberal German Kulturkampf, when the Prussian nobility aligned with liberals to deny Catholics basic civil rights after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. See my review here.
What is it about "progressives" that causes them to re-work historic bigotries and ancient cliches time after time?
If you imagine you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you are deluding yourself. If you remain a “good Catholic,” you are doing “bad” to women’s rights. You’re kidding yourself if you think the Church is ever going to add a Doctrine of Immaculate ContraCeption.
Har, har, har...Doctrine of the Immaculate Contraception...get it?!?!?!?!
Now, she's beginning to sound like some lunatic fundamentalist anti-catholic bigot.
*Sigh* That schtick never gets old.
It is disgraceful that U.S. health care reform is being held hostage to the Catholic Church’s bizarre opposition to medically prescribed contraception.
If they have to give in to the "papists," health care will be set back to the a time long-forgetten....about two months ago!!!
No one can resist! Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Fuhrer!
Dayum...that stuff gets your blood stirring!
No politician should jeopardize electability for failure to genuflect before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
And now we dust off 19th Century Know-Nothingism.
(Question to ask your Bishop: Does he hold up an umbrella against the rain? Isn’t that just as “unnatural” as using a condom or diaphragm?)
Don't. Just don't.
You'll embarass yourself even further in your obvious lack of any understanding of Natural Law or teleology.
Your Church hysterically claims that secular medical policy is “an assault against religious liberty.”
No, it claims that coercing people to do or subsidize things that are an anathema to their religious principles is an "assault on religious liberty."
Weird, but there was a time when liberals claimed they were concerned about freedom of conscience.
You are savvy enough to realize that the real assault is by the Church against women’s rights and health care.
Because, obviously, by doing nothing, such as not paying for something, that's really assaulting "women's health care."
So, this woman is assaulting me by not paying my bar tab?
This is just the weirdest reasoning ever.
As Nation columnist Katha Pollitt asks: Is it an offense against Jehovah Witnesses that health care coverage will include blood transfusions?
I don't know. Maybe we should ask them.
The Amish, as Pollitt points out, don’t label cars “an assault on religious liberty” and try to force everyone to drive buggies.
And we force the Amish to pay for other peoples'cars...when exactly?
The louder the Church cries “offense against religious liberty” the harder it works to take away women’s liberty.
The louder that people cry "theft," the more they work against other peoples' ability to take their property from them.
The point is what? That if you define the other person's inactivity as an assault, then that inactivity is an assault?
Obama has compromised, but the Church never budges, instead launching a vengeful modern-day Inquisition. Look at its continuing directives to parish priests to use their pulpits every Sunday to lobby you against Obama’s policy, the Church's announcement of a major anti-contraception media campaign — using your tithes, contributions and donations — to defeat Obama’s laudable health care policy. The Church has introduced into Congress the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, ” a bill to place the conscienceless Catholic Church's "rights of conscience" above the rights of conscience of 53 percent of Americans. That the Church has "conscience rights" to deny women their rights is a kissing cousin to the claim that “corporations are people.” The Church that hasn’t persuaded you to oppose contraception now wants to use the force of secular law to deny contraceptive rights to non-Catholics.
How dare Catholics expect to use democracy for their protection!
Ein Volk! Ein...well, you get the drift.
But is there any point in going on? After all, your misplaced loyalty has lasted through two decades of public sex scandals involving preying priests, children you may have known as victims, and church complicity, collusion and coverup going all the way to the top. Are you like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go?
Lady, you don't know the half of it. I have a government that turns a blind eye to pedophile teachers, takes half my income for taxes and runs trillions of dollars in deficits and ....
Oh, wait, you weren't talking about that.
But we have a more welcoming home to offer, free of incense-fogged ritual, free of what freethinker Bertrand Russell called “ideas uttered long ago by ignorant men,” free of blind obedience to an illusory religious authority. Join those of us who put humanity above dogma.
Kill young children!
Kill the disabled!
Prevent Catholics from exercising their democratic rights!
Ein Volk! etc., etc.
As a member of the “flock” of an avowedly antidemocratic club, isn’t it time you vote with your feet? Please, exit en Mass.
It's a free church. The door is that way.
By the way, we Catholics are the winning side.
We faced down the Roman empire, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the French Revolution and a thousand other petty tyrants.
We survived.
We're here.
They are not.
Have fun with your new friends.
We will still be here when they are long-forgotten.
Posts
