ephemera

Matt Gemmell:

From the moral perspective of His Holiness (and most of the wildly differing, contradictory, and all equally human-originated and fabricated religions), homosexuality as a whole is “wrong”, and is at least partially sinful (I say “partially” because the current version of Catholic dogma fatuously distinguishes homosexual ‘tendencies’ as not being a sin, but homosexual intercourse being very much so - as if the two could or should be separated).

My own system of morality, however, regards the following as immoral acts:

• Perpetuating institutionalised discrimination.
• Indulging in the sophistry of equating morality with sexuality.
• Perpetuating the deeply unhealthy doctrine of priestly celibacy, thus creating highly damaged, disturbed and repressed human beings.
• Perpetuating sexist and homophobic attitudes under the guise of fabricated divine will.
• Perpetuating the monstrous and intellectually criminal assertion that morality is conferred by faith, and absent without it.
• Aiming the slander of ‘immorality’ against a harmless and normal state of being.
• The idea that a consensual relationship, between adults of sound mind, could be somehow immoral is itself repugnant.

If the charge of immorality arises from nothing but the sexual orientation of those people, we must upgrade that judgement to literally criminal.

Later:

Indoctrination of children into religious belief systems is one of the great unpunished intellectual and social crimes of human history, and it continues almost unabated to this day. The word “indoctrination”, of course, means teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically - which is exactly what happens. To argue that a four-year-old, taken to Sunday School or such for the first time, is even capable of applying a critical analysis to the dogma is laughable. These children are victims, and the crime is one of morality.