Pope Goes Haywire (and then, so do I)

First, via Raw Story, we learn that the Pope wants immunity from a pending lawsuit in Texas alleging that he was complicit in the cover-up of the sexual abuse of three boys by a seminarian. Then, via Pam, we learn that he has allegedly approved a ban on gay seminarians.

The long-anticipated document, prepared at the request of the late Pope John Paul II, reportedly calls on bishops to bar even chaste homosexuals from seminaries because their orientation is rooted in a personality disorder that may undermine their capacity to minister, according to Catholic World News.

[…]

Since the recent priest sex abuse scandal, the issue of gay priests has gone from taboo to one of the most hotly debated aspects of the crisis. Noting that the overwhelming majority of victims were teenage boys, powerful members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have framed the problem as homosexual priests unable to live chastely. Liberals tend to see the roots of the scandal in a culture of clerical secrecy and the church's mandatory celibacy requirement.

Okay, I don’t know about anyone else, but this liberal tends to see the roots of the scandal in the church’s insistence that the problem is gay men as opposed to pedophiles. Its insistence on protecting pedophiles, which makes the priesthood an ever more desirable profession for men who want access to children, an occupational status conferring trust with children, and protection from prosecution, is frankly secondary to the problem that the church refuses to correctly identify the real culprits, which doesn’t require a gay witch hunt but a bloody mirror. If they stopped protecting pedophiles, pedophiles wouldn’t continue to infiltrate the priesthood and would instead hang around schoolyards until they’re arrested and thrown in jail to be repeatedly raped by cellmate Bubba where they belong.

The great irony of all this “overwhelming majority of victims were teenage boys” rubbish that’s used as a justification to ban gay men from the priesthood is that it was the church’s own sexism that created the demographics of the victims. When this shit started, how many altar girls were there? Oh yeah, none, because the church wouldn’t allow it. And it’s also due to cultural sexism, which leads parents to send their young sons on overnight camping trips and church retreats etc. with adult men—something they would never do with their daughters. Is a 13-year-old boy better at defending himself against unwanted sexual advances from a trusted adult than a 13-year-old girl? No. But still off go the Boy Scouts and the altar boys, with their parents’ permission. If you wouldn’t send your daughter, don’t send your son. Pedophiles are overwhelmingly male and are predators of opportunity; the majority of them don’t give a shit whether they’ve got a boy or a girl in their clutches, but because of the double standards that we apply to children, we give them access to boys in larger numbers.

Not that the church cares about any of this, apparently. Just get rid of the gay priests; that’ll solve everything. Bastards.