Atheism, fuck yeah!
Welcome atheists, skeptics, freethinkers all,
to this little corner of godlessness.
~Mooglets

The Vatican is taking issue with the fight for marriage equality in Europe and around the world, saying that same-sex couples live in a “different reality” and continue to chase the “utopia” of equality.

L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Holy See, printed a front-page editorial on Monday titled “Marriage Is Not a Contract,” claiming, according to a Google translation of the text, that same-sex couples live in some sort of “different reality” where they believe the foundations of society will not quake if an “utopia” of equality, which “caused such damage in the twentieth century,” is achieved.

Via Think Progress: 

Saying that marriage between a woman and a man is equal to that between two homosexuals is, in fact, a denial of the truth that affects one of the basic structures of human society, the family. We cannot base a society on these foundations without then paying a very high price as happened in the past when there was an attempt to achieve total economic and social equality. Why repeat the same mistake and chase after an unattainable utopia?

The Vatican’s editorial condemns same-sex couples adopting children, stating that this will only lead to “new forms of exploitation” in science, according to a Google translation.

The article also criticizes a piece that appeared in the French Catholic weekly Temoignage Chretien, which endorsed the country’s controversial gay marriage bill, according to Queerty. The Vatican says the French article seeks to only promote what is trendy, reports The Hindu Business Line. “Being Catholic is about much more than embracing fashionable cultural standpoints,” writes the Vatican.

The editorial follows Pope Benedict XVI’s declaration that same-sex marriage goes against nature and threatens justice and peace.

“There is…a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union,” he said during his World Day of Peace 2013 address Friday. “Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society. These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity.”

On Sunday, gay rights activists peacefully picketed in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City during the pope’s weekly prayers to proest his anti-gay comments. An online campaign featuring photos of LGBT people with the phrase “I am a threat to peace” was also launched in Italy and has already posted thousands of images to its Facebook page.

HuffPo

California became the first state toban the use for minors of disputed therapies to “overcome” homosexuality, a step hailed by gay rights groups across the country that say the therapies have caused dangerous emotional harm to gay and lesbian teenagers. In a statement,California Gov. Jerry Brownsaid, “This bill bans non-scientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide. These practices have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

This law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, will prohibit attempts by mental health providers to perform therapy on minors intended to change their sexual orientation, including efforts to “change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Christine P. Sun, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and director of its LGBT rights project,commented on the significance of this law:

This is a great day for youth in California who have been subjected to incredibly harmful therapy based on junk science. Conversion therapy has brought nothing but pain and devastation for many who have endured it. Sadly, the conversion therapy movement has pushed its message for decades — despite the dangers of this practice — and has increasingly targeted LGBT youth across the country. Passing this law is an important step for California and the nation to raise awareness about the lies behind conversion therapy and put an end to this junk science.

Emphasis here on the phrase “junk science.”The American Psychological Association denounced the use of ex-gay therapies. Furthermore, in 2012Dr. Robert Spitzerrefuted his earlier infamous claims touted by the ex-gay movement as gospel that “highly motivated” gay people could reach their “heterosexual potential” through prayer and therapy. Even theex-gay group Exodus Internationalbacked away from promising a cure for “homosexuality” though they and other like minded groups still maintain that “homosexuality” represents a sin that one must overcome.

Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, notes that while the California law might be a milestone, it should be seen as a first step. He said that “the ideas in reparative therapy have been widely adopted by church ministries and others promoting the idea that homosexual urges can be banished .”

As expected organizations like theLiberty Counseland theNational Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)who advance the view that “homosexuality is a choice” took to the airwaves and Internet to justify their use of debunked medical practices under the guise of “religious freedom” and “parental rights.”

These “pro-family” activists conveniently ignore the glaring reality that this law does not force any religious entity or individual to go against their individual conscience. Within the confines of their church or home school scenarios, clergy and parents have considerable latitude when it comes to teaching the doctrines of their particular faith tradition. (In a similar vein, no law supporting marriage equality will force anyone to perform a same sex wedding. Ordained clergy have the right to refuse to marry anyone for any reason, a simple fact lost on those determined to legislate their view of Americana Christianity on to an ever increasing pluralistic public square.)

Under this law, unlicensed “Christian” counselors can continue their practice of “praying away the gay.” Hence, parents can still find resources should they wish to “cure” their children from the “sin of homosexuality” provided they can pay for the cost of these treatments. However, this law denies those mental health professionals who hold licenses issued by the state of California from engaging in practices deemed to be harmful to minor children. Should they continue to practice ex-gay therapies, they will risk censure and loss of their license. Simply put, if one wants the benefits that comes with having a state issued license such as insurance reimbursement, then one has to follow the civil laws issued by that state.

This law continues in the spirit of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bob Jones University vs. United States (1983) where the SCOTUS decreed that those faith-based organizations who choose to avail themselves to financial incentives offered by the U.S. government like tax-exempt status and federal funding must abide by civil laws or risk losing said financial incentives.

—-

WashingtonPost

Good. Not the end point, but definitely an important step along the way. 

~Mooglets

DEFENDERS of Cornwall’s new faith secondary school have hit back at critics’ “orchestrated attack to undermine” it.

Supporters and representatives argued there was a need for St Michael’s Catholic free school as a place to teach moral values.

Wallace Simmons, the grandfather of a former student, called a meeting with governor Joyce Sanderson, Father Chris Findlay, priest at the church associated with the school at Camborne, and the West Briton in response to criticism over its funding from the Government as it prepares to open next week.

Formerly St Michael’s Catholic Small School in Truro, it is now the UK’s first Catholic free secondary, funded directly from the Government, rather than through the local education authority.

The school was dubbed an “ideological gimmick” by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and local politicians and a head teacher criticised the £4.5 million being spent to extend it, despite 600 available places at secondaries in the Camborne, Pool and Redruth area.

This week Mr Wallace called the criticism an “orchestrated attack to undermine the school”.

“The whole population is taught that homosexuality is fine and children should accept they can have two mums or dads but they should not be taught that nonsense. It is not right,” Mr Simmons said.

“Schools are not teaching basic family values and that mum and dad are the heads of the family and that’s how it should be.

“There are so many problems in schools today where basic family values are not taught and it is OK for Jack to marry Jack and not Jill.

“The morals of this country should not be dragged down.”

Mrs Sanderson was quick to reassure that the school would not discriminate over sexuality, but said those students from homosexual backgrounds were expected to respect Catholic values on family life.

“Gays would be welcome to this school,” she said, “but we would not encourage it.

“We want to know they (children) are happy to follow our teaching and that’s crucial. We do not wish to make children unhappy and refer to their home circumstances.

“I think those people who declare their views are entitled to express them as much as I am entitled to do so.

“The school follows the teaching of Catholic values and treatment (of children) is charitable.

“We lay down what you should try to follow but how people follow it is their business.”

The school also assured it had a good track record and something positive to offer to the community.

Father Findlay said Catholic education was not a gimmick but a “strong brand” and “something many people value”.

He added: “We have our own ethos and approach to school. We have a clear understanding about the human person and how a person fits into the society including everything from marriage, work- place, family life, self-discipline and clarity of moral values.”

thisiscornwall

Excuse me. Government funding. GOVERNMENT FUNDING. WTF. 

Also, fuck you, Catholicism. Fuck. You.

~Mooglets

The religious stood together today outside of Chick-Fil-A’s nationwide.

More, in fact, at one time than we’ve ever seen waiting for a chance to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or stand up for social outcasts whom society has marginalized… like the entire homosexual community.

You know, things Jesus actually told his followers to do.

Irony is a bitch.

Today, Christians stood up for what they call “traditional marriage”, even though most forms of traditional marriage in the Christian Bible are illegal in the US (and for good reason). And all this despite the fact that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock and grew up with (arguably) two fathers. Where does any of that fit into the Religious Right’s image of traditional family values?

Isn’t it weird to live in a so-called Christian nation that would have cut funding to programs Jesus’ own family would have greatly benefitted from? But I digress…

The larger question looming over this entire debate is: Where would that first century bastard-son-of-a-carpenter-turned-social-revolutionary even fit in our modern American society when it comes to the whole marriage debacle?

Does anyone out there really think he’d have been seen waiting in line for a (relatively adequate) chicken sandwich while simultaneously opposing equality? Probably not. In fact, that sounds like something that might hinder people from hearing the Christian message of love and acceptance. And he probably wouldn’t have been protesting on the other side of the parking lot, either.

Continue to read this article at An American Atheist

A Catholic hospitalis being suedfor denial of HIV medication to a gay man “for going against God’s will.”

Trinitas Regional Medical Center, says Joao Simoes, admitted him last August but then denied him the medicine he needed and also would not let his sister see him.

Denial of access to medicine for people living with HIV/AIDS, even for short periods, can have serious consequences for long term survival because ofdrug resistance. This can result from missing as few as five doses — which Simoes says he missed.

The complaint says that after admittance he metDr. Susan V. Borga. She asked him how he had acquired HIV and “closed the plaintiff’s file, put it down and looked at plaintiff with disgust on her face and asked, coldly, ‘Is that from sex with men?’”

Three days later, he was finally permitted to ring his personal physician and learned that he had already told Borga about his medication, but he had not received any or been visited by any doctor.

Borga had allegedly told his physician: “You must be gay, too, if you’re his doctor.”

The complaint adds:

Additionally, apparently realizing that plaintiff’s doctor had an accent, Dr. Borga exclaimed, “What, do you need a translator?” to which plaintiff’s doctor had again responded that Dr. Borga needed to give plaintiff his HIV medication.

Dr. Borga responded to plaintiff’s doctor by stating, “This is what he gets for going against God’s will,” and hung up the phone on plaintiff’s doctor.

American Medical Association (AMA) policy is that“physicians can conscientiously object to the treatment of a patient only in non-emergent situations” and that they “must provide alternative(s) which include a prompt and appropriate referral.”

Principle I of the AMA Principles of Medical Ethics calls upon physicians to provide medical care with compassion and respect for human dignity and rights. Accordingly, physicians may not decline to accept patients based on their race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or “any other basis that would constitute invidious discrimination”

You can sign a petition to Trinitas here.

Care2

That is some fucked up shit right there. 

~Mooglets

A gay Iowa teenager has been told that he cannot receive the Matthew Shepard Scholarship at his Catholic school’s annual awards ceremony.

Prince of Peace Catholic school senior Keaton Fuller was initially told that he could accept the scholarship at his school’s awards ceremony on May 20. According to the Eychaner Foundation of Des Moines, which granted the scholarship, Fuller even learned of the scholarship from his school, and the principal issued a statement to notify the scholarship committee that he could accept the award at the ceremony.

But weeks later, the opportunity to formally accept the scholarship at his high school has been revoked after pressure from the local Catholic diocese. “It is difficult to understand how after I have spent 13 years at this school and worked hard during all of them, I would be made to feel that my accomplishments are less than everybody else’s,” Fuller wrote in a letter to the student body and staff. “This whole ordeal has been incredibly hurtful, and I am even sadder that this will be one of my last experiences to remember my high school years by.”

The Matthew Shepard Scholarship grants $40,000 to an openly LGBT student attending the University of Iowa the following fall. Fuller won the scholarship based on his academic work as well as his efforts to reduce homophobia at school and in his community.

As of Tuesday morning, more than 4,000 people have signed a Change.org petition supporting Fuller and asking the school’s principal, superintendent Leland Morrision, and Bishop Martin J. Amos change their minds.

Advocate.com

Pope Benedict said Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined “the future of humanity itself.”

The pope made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a new year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican in which he touched on some economic and social issues facing the world today.

He told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of children needed proper “settings” and that “pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman.”

“This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,” he said.

The Vatican and Catholic officials around the world have protested against moves to legalize gay marriage in Europe and other developed parts of the world.

One leading opponent of gay marriage in the United States is New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, whom the pope will elevate to cardinal next month.

Dolan fought against gay marriage before it became legal in New York state last June, and in September he sent a letter to President Barack Obama criticizing his administration’s decision not to support a federal ban on gay marriage.

In that letter Dolan, who holds the powerful post of president of the U.S. Bishops Conference, said such a policy could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”

The Roman Catholic Church, which has some 1.3 billion members worldwide, teaches that while homosexual tendencies are not sinful, homosexual acts are, and that children should grow up in a traditional family with a mother and a father.

“The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and states; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue,” Benedict told the diplomats.

Gay marriage is legal in a number of European countries, including Spain and the Netherlands.

Some Churches that have allowed gay marriage, women priests, gay clergy and gay bishops have been losing members to Catholicism, and the Vatican has taken steps to facilitate their conversion.

In 2009, Benedict decreed that Anglicans who leave their Church, many because they feel it has become too liberal, can find a home in Catholicism in a parallel hierarchy that allows them to keep some of their traditions.

The Vatican has since set up “ordinariates,” structures similar to dioceses, in Britain and the United States to oversee ex-Anglicans who have converted and be a point of contact for those wishing to do so.

Reuters 

Yet more despicable evidence that the Vatican is unwilling to grow up.

Also, that Pope Benedict hasn’t done his history. Marriage has only recently become a religious thing, old boy, please get your head around that. Before religion got it’s hands on marriage, it was predominantly a loveless legal contract between families. 

If you want to talk about ‘traditional marriages’ - how far back do you want to go? To the 50’s, perhaps? Where it was legal to rape your spouse? To the 1800’s where women had little to no say in their marriages, and if they ended up pregnant out of wedlock, they were shunned by society as a whole? Even earlier? To when pre-pubescent girls could be married off, specifically for land, goods and money? When as soon as they started menstruating, they were considered eligible to produce heirs?

And which particular cultures ‘traditional marriage’ do you want to fall back on? White, Christian Europeans aren’t the only ones who have marriage, you know. So?

And when it comes to children, the sex, gender, age, skin-colour, creed or what have you, makes no difference. If the child is brought up in a stable and loving environment, be that with a mother and father, two mothers, two fathers, a single parent, their grandparents, their elder siblings, cousins, Foster carers, non-binary carers/parents, mixed-orientation carers/parents - whatever - the child will be fine. 

It is stability and nurturing that children need. Not one mother, one father, married in a religious setting. 

Get the fuck over yourselves Catholics - and other conservative religions.

The world is starting to grow up and realise that people come in all shapes, sizes, colours, genders and sexualities. You are lagging very far behind indeed. If you persist in this bigoted, backward way of viewing the world, you are going to find yourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble - of your own making, even!

~Mooglets

GOP primary debate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasted what he said was anti-Christian bigotry in the media, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry promised to end what he sees as the Obama administration’s “war on religion.”

“The bigotry question goes both ways,” Gingrich said, inserting himself into the discussion after a series of questions related to contraception, gay marriage and gay adoption. The former speaker charged that the focus on social issues indicated media bias.

“And there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.”

Gingrich specifically knocked a question about whether the assembled candidates would allow gay couples to adopt.

“You don’t hear the opposite question asked,” he explained.

“Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?”

Shortly after Gingrich’s attack on the media, Texas Gov. Rick Perry pivoted from a question about whether he would consider a third-party run to promise that if elected president he would end what he called “this administration’s war on religion.”

“When we see an administration that will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act, that gives their Justice Department clear instructions to go take the ministerial exception away from our churches where that’s never happened before, when we see this administration not giving money to Catholic charities for sexually trafficked individuals because they don’t agree with the Catholic church on abortion, that is a war against religion. And it’s going to stop under a Perry administration.”

The Daily Caller

‘Anti-Christian bigotry in the media’? Seriously? What fucking world are you living in, Gingrich. Obviously some special snowflake world where he gets to play martyr for an imaginary cause. Fuck off mate, Christianity in America is the largest religious presence, it’s invaded all of American Politics and keeps invading the schools and medical centres. What you are calling ‘anti-Christian bigotry’ is non-Christians and secularists fighting back and trying to keep your fucking government secular, as it fucking should be. 

There’s a lot more of it happening today, because the world is growing the fuck up and realising that bowing and scraping to an iron-age goat herders god is a bad fucking idea, with no basis in reality. 

Should Catholic Churches be forced to close their adoption centres? No. And they fucking weren’t. They were given an ultimatum and they decided that instead of growing the fuck up and realising that being adopted by gay couples isn’t a bad thing in the slightest, they decided to keep their stupid fucking bigoted views and closed instead of changing. 

Oh boo fucking hoo, Perry, the world is growing up and changing around you! But you and your frst class, white, cis-male, hetero privileged ass doesn’t like this change, doesn’t accept that the world is growing up! You’re so scared of change, you’re seeing conspiracies and bigotry where there are none. 

Stop throwing your binky at the damn floor in a tantrum and grow up, Governor. 

~Mooglets

A Chicago cardinal is under fire from gay rights groups following a comment that compared the gay rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan.

During an interview with Fox Chicago on Wednesday, Cardinal Francis George was asked for his opinion on a local pastor complaining that the annual gay pride parade would force his church to cancel their morning mass.

George said he supported the pastor and told Fox: “You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.”

Pressed by the interviewer he continued: “The rhetoric of the KKK and the rhetoric of some of the gay liberation people — Who is the enemy? The Catholic Church.”

Equally Blessed, a coalition of four Catholic groups that work for LGBT rights, said in a statement: “Cardinal George’s offensive comments are further evidence of just how insensitive and out of touch the hierarchy is, and why opposition to its views is necessary.”

Organisers of the Chicago gay pride parade have since reached a compromise with Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church to a later start time, to avoid disrupting Sunday Masses.

From Pink Paper

Are you fucking kidding me?

~Mooglets