Slap A Condom On The Vatican

Slap A Condom On The Vatican
They say condoms kill. Meanwhile, millions die of AIDS. Can the Catholic Church be stopped?
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/10/17/note101703.DTL

And then you hear the one about the "top Vatican official," one of those ultra-dour black-robed cardinals who never see daylight or the modern world or love, espousing the official Vatican line in a recent interview, claiming that condoms do not, in fact, prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus.

"Relying on condoms is like betting on your own death," muttered Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family. True. He said it. And lightning, shockingly, did not strike his pasty sanctimonious butt dead on the spot.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20031015/hl_nm/
pope_aids_dc_1

Just one more reason the church doesn't advocate condom use, they say, claiming that the AIDS virus is 450 times smaller than sperm and can therefore pass through the latex barrier and spread disease and kill you. Hence, condoms are deadly and should not be used. By anyone. At any time. Ever. This is what they say. Oh, and condoms promote promiscuity, too. Which is very, very bad.

Why should you care? You shouldn't, really. The church's latest insidious lie wouldn't matter in the slightest, and would, in fact, be merely cute and totally dismissible, like most "official" Vatican doctrine, were it not for the fact that the Vatican is instructing its priests all over the world, including those in AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa and Asia, to condemn condom use.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200310141006.html

In places, that is, where the disease has killed millions and affects millions more, where misinformation is rampant and treatment sparse, and where increased condom use could have a very serious and beneficial impact on preventing further spread. Nope, no condoms, says the church. Very bad, they sneer.

Their solution? Abstinence. Their ignorance and audacity? Appalling. Their karmic debt for continuing to be this ethically dangerous, sexually oppressive, misogynistic, homophobic force in the world? Incalculable.

The church restricts doctors from talking about condoms in poor nations. They prohibit AIDS-testing centers from handing out condoms to those most at risk of the deadly disease. Your country's being ravaged by a killer virus and you're at incredible risk of death? Too bad for you. Don't have sex. From Nicaragua to Kenya and the Philippines, where AIDS is raging like wildfire, the lie is the same: The church says condoms can kill.

This is nothing new. The Vatican just really, really loathes condoms. And sex. And homosexuals. And women. And anything that might inhibit procreation, or that in any way empowers people to take control over their reproduction options, or that might somehow loosen the church's viselike grip.

They hate birth control and RU-486 and the morning-after pill, spermicides and anal sex and premarital sex, and of course abortion is a major, world-class sin, and by the way low-rise jeans and thong underwear are right up there on the sin hierarchy, too, you can bet. You see the pope twitching like that? He just saw the latest J.Lo video. 'Nuff said.

The facts are irrefutable. Everyone from the horrified World Health Organization to your own grandmother knows that, unless they tear or are somehow misused, condoms have a nearly 100 percent success rate in preventing the transmission of STDs, including the virus that causes AIDS. And to decree otherwise, to prohibit this cheap, accessible health-care option from those most in need of it is to, very literally, let countless people suffer and die.

Meanwhile, the church is paying numerous multimillion-dollar settlements to hush up those endless lawsuits about its very own rampant and centuries-old tradition of sexual deviance and abuse.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2003/10/16/
national0652EDT0504.DTL&nl=fix

It quietly apologizes to the victims while in the same breath slaps homosexuality and pedophilia as unforgivable sins, even as countless pairs of young male feet shuffle from bed to bed after lights-out at the local seminary. Apparently, there is no Latin root for "staggering hypocrisy."

Again, nothing new. From the European witch hunts in the Middle Ages, during which tens of thousands of women (and men) were killed by some of the most brutal means possible, many as a direct result of churchly paranoia and fear, to the Inquisition, the Crusades and even the Holocaust itself, during which the goodly church was nowhere to be found, its negligent awareness of, or direct involvement in, the death of millions is simply soaked in irresponsibility and misinformation, if not open-faced lies and cruelty and endless power struggles.

http://www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/1998/01/
msg00284.html

Here is the good news: Most practicing Catholics you know are far, far removed from Pope HQ, and practice their religion on their own terms, with reverence and progressive thought and inner fortitude, and love and latex and laughter and healthy doses of irony and perspective.

Most modern Catholics have nothing whatsoever to do with bitter Vatican doctrine, and merely laugh in the face of such sanctimonious rigidity and have tons of sex and use condoms like crazy and celebrate women and homosexuals and don't give one shiny rosary bead for what some sour cardinal claims.

And who doesn't know someone from that beloved Catholic subspecies, the recovering Catholic, nonpracticing, slightly warped, deeply scarred
from probably just this type of repressive Vatican dogma, but shrugging it off, moving on, as they -- like much of the rest of the world -- now know better.

http://www.freedomfromcatholicism.com

And let it be said that there are indeed countless priests, if not entire Catholic sects, that have worked tirelessly over the years to save lives, to protect innocents, to help and heal and educate. And, indeed, there are many "radical" priests out there right now who are rejecting the Vatican's latest decree over condoms, and handing them out anyway.

But they are a minority. They have little widespread influence. And they are far, far overshadowed by the overarching scowl of the Vatican, which still wields enormous power.

This is why it matters. One cardinal's little statement can still have a deadly effect, can still spell ruin for tens of thousands of lives in countries where modern thought and medicine and wealth and tolerance have yet to penetrate and take root.

This much is obvious. The Vatican has wielded far too much negative influence for far too long. The church holds much of Western history in its locked vaults, vast storehouses of secrets and prohibitions and repressed belief, misogyny, homophobia, a truly staggering history of cover-up and misinfo and clumsy religious evolution.

The Vatican has worked diligently to snuff out sexual and ideological progress in its own ranks, not to mention any sort of alternative spiritual practice. It thwarts female priests, burn proofs of its own atrocities and buries its long history of sexual predation. And, now, it appears to be willing to let thousands, perhaps even millions, of people die of a brutal disease simply because the church doesn't approve of little latex penis sheaths.

Verily, isn't it about time the world, not to mention God herself, let this one remaining Roman Empire crumble into dust?