UK Guardian: Christmas on Planet Pope

[bluedawg12]

The Holy Father has got the spirit of the season all wrong with his message of fear and exclusion
Wednesday 24 December 2008
Giles Fraser

The Christmas angel tells us: "Fear not, for I bring you good news of great joy for all people." The pope, on the other hand, has been using this Christmas season to spread entirely the opposite message, a message of fear and exclusion that seems more bad news than good.

For, apparently, gay people threaten the existence of the planet in a way that is comparable to the destruction of the rainforest.

I guess the idea is that if we all were gay, then we wouldn't be making any babies.

Yes, it's a bit like saying that if we all were to become celibate priests we wouldn't be making any babies either. Except that would mean the Catholic church has itself become a threat to the planet.

So where does this religious obsession with making babies come from? I had a moment of epiphany some years ago in a refugee camp in southern Gaza. So many families had so many children, often a dozen or more. It was explained to me that the Palestinians' secret weapon against the Israelis was "the Palestinian womb". That women were regarded as part of a wider demographic struggle, and that having babies was vital to the war effort.

The writers of the early Hebrew scriptures were similarly caught up in a struggle for survival that made having babies a part of one's moral duty.

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This is the great obsession of much of the early history of the people of Israel. From this perspective, fertile women are politically valuable, and infertile women, homosexuals and eunuchs considered almost traitorous.

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But there's a twist here. For when it comes to the book of Isaiah, Jesus's favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures, this more enlightened biblical author realises that the obsession with children has warped the moral values of his culture.


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Isaiah writes that "to the eunuchs that keep my Sabbaths and hold fast to my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name that is better than sons and daughters".

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Inclusion is not a piece of trendy modern theory. It is a biblical imperative.

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For Christians especially this new understanding is that God is there for all; that, as St Paul is very keen to insist, you don't even need to be a Jew for God to be there for you.

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The broader theme of the pope's address concerns gender theory. His idea is that trendy philosophy has obscured the distinctiveness of male and female, which ought to be regarded as rooted in the order of creation. As it happens, evangelical Christians are often incredibly suspicious of this sort of line. They are afraid that it endorses the argument that, because homosexuality is actually prevalent in nature, and because people seem to be "born gay", natural law ethics could be won round to regard homosexuality as natural and thus good.

<snip>

In light of this, conservative evangelicals have begun to take an interest in precisely the sort of gender theory that the pope excoriates. It seems bizarre to me that evangelicals have started to read postmodern philosophers such as Michel Foucault with approval, but what they argue is that because our sexual inclinations are not stubbornly rooted in nature, they are more plastic and thus they are capable of being changed. In this way they can argue that gay people are not gay because of intransigent nature but because of wilful disobedience. Foucault would turn in his grave.

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[jeff30997]

1. I'm Catholic...

And guess what.That asshole doesn't represent me.And I would gladly kick him where it hurts!!!

Hey Ratz! Go fuck yourself instead of a quire boy !!!

[kenny blankenship]

2. I don't know that I'd rely on St. Paul for any pro-gay argument

Paul is the source of all anti-feminist rhetoric and homophobia in the NT. He's a nasty piece of work.

[bluedawg12]

3. He also never married and wrote about marriage as:

if you must give in to your lusts, then, you should be married, but he wasn't pushing for marriage.