William Saletan is probably right to say that the Vatican's current anti-gay policyrepresents the continuation of Ratzinger's nearly career-long homophobic
vendetta. I wonder if Bennie consults
the Death Clock? According to it, he's been dead for four years.
Could be the problem, couldn't it? Look at the ages of the principal campaigners against nearly everything, and contemplate the actuarial years left for men (they're mostly men) of their generation. Talk about a biological clock! If it seems as if the drumbeat of reaction has reached extraordinary levels of intensity lately, that may be the chief reason. In this country, it's become clear that the Idiot-in-Chief will run out of clout long before he runs out of days
in office (if he hasn't already).The base "base" likely feels a cold, sick sensation in the gut, a frantic urgency that says they must do it now, or forever be defeated.
The likelihood that Bennie will live more than four more years, or at least be of sound mind for over four more years, is statistically limited as well. Dubya is the more limited of the two, and not just mentally. There is some bit of karmic centring working against the administration, but I place more confidence in the ability of elephants to turn into weasels with the prospect of a lost election looming. Bennie, though, is an absolute monarch. In the few years he has left, he can, and probably will, do irreparable damage to Catholicism, as well as re-open those breaches between faiths that progressives have been loath to exploit.
For those who didn't read it, I suspect the really scary message of The DaVinci Code wasn't the main one. It was the subtext that the metaphor of the "end times" meant not the end of the planet, but the end of Christianity. That's both more plausible and more frightening to the establishment. Perhaps it's too much to hope that the sinking of the SS Christianity would
suck down the other desert religions with it.
Speaking of...it takes a lot of faith to swallow whole the idea that, after a millenium or so of saying Limbo exists, we now say it doesn't because the Holy Catholic Church now plans to do the 180 it has considered for some years. This of course touches a question skeptics have posed to the faithful for years. If you profess to believe all of a church's teaching, how is it that in fact you only believe the parts that line up with your preconceptions? The idea of Limbo came into being in the Middle Ages through just such a feat of ecclesiastical gymnastics, and its's going down in the same way.
Why dump Limbo as a belief as opposed to, say, homophobia? Babies are cute,
of course. Gay people are....hmm well, that depends who's looking and who's
being looked at, doesn't it?
