Category: Catholic Crazies

Jews Branded ‘Enemies of Church’ by Catholic Cult

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Crazies, Catholic Crimes, Catholic Crimes Against Humanity, Catholic Crusade, Catholic Crusaders, Catholic Dictators, Catholic Empire, Catholic Fanaticism, Catholic Fanatics, Catholic Fascism, Catholic Fascist, Catholic Fascists, Catholic Hate Crimes, Catholic Hitler, Catholic Inquisition, Catholic Sect

Jews Branded ‘Enemies of Church’ by Catholic Sect
Society of Pius X Leader Says Jews Engineered Vatican II
Fighting Change: Some Catholic traditionalists blame Jews for the reforms of the Vatican II conference.

GETTY IMAGES

Fighting Change: Some Catholic traditionalists blame Jews for the reforms of the Vatican II conference.

Jews are “enemies of the Church,” the head of a radical Catholic sect said in Canada.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, made the remark during a Dec. 28 address at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy in New Hamburg, Ontario, about 90 minutes’ drive west of Toronto. He was reviewing the situation of the society, which opposes Catholic Church reforms decided by the Second Vatican Council and is not recognized by the Church.

Apparently speaking without a text, Fellay asked, “Who during that time was the most opposed that the Church would recognize the society? The enemies of the Church: the Jews, the Masons, the modernists.”

According to the Catholic News Service, Fellay added that Jewish leaders’ support of reforming Second Vatican Council “shows that Vatican II is their thing, not the Church’s.”

As of Friday, there was no response from the society’s Swiss headquarters to a Catholic News Service email request for comment, the agency reported.

The Society of St. Pius X, , was founded in 1970 as a reaction against the Vatican’s efforts to modernize. In 2009, Pope Benedict launched talks with the society and lifted excommunications imposed on its four bishops.

One of the bishops was Richard Williamson, who has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died during World War II.

The society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy regime in France and the far-right National Front, and in a 1985 letter to Pope John Paul II identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons.”

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Philippines Begins To Dismantle The Shackles of Catholic Medievalism

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic, Catholic Abortion Politics, Catholic Abuse, Catholic Abuse of Women, Catholic Baby Stealing, Catholic Celibacy, Catholic Censorship, Catholic Child Abuse, Catholic Child Molestation, Catholic Child Rapists, Catholic Crackpots, Catholic Crazies, Catholic Creeps, Catholic Crimes, Catholic Crimes Against Humanity, Catholic Crusade, Catholic Crusaders, Catholic Demagogues, Catholic Dictators, Catholic Empire, Catholic Fanatic, Catholic Fanaticism, Catholic Fanatics, Catholic Fascism, Catholic Fascist, Catholic Fascists, Catholic Hate Crimes, Catholic Hitler, Catholic Inquisition, Catholic Intolerance, Catholic League, Catholic Lunatics, Catholic Molestation, Catholic Nazi Nexus, Catholic Nazis, Catholic Nazism, CATHOLIC PEDOPHILES, Catholic Perverts, Catholic Power, Catholic Predators, Catholic Priests, Catholic Regressive, Catholic Reich, Catholic Right, Catholic Sadism, Catholic Sadists, Catholic Selling Babies for Money, Catholic Sex Abuse, Catholic Sex Crimes, Catholic Supremacism, Catholic Terror, Catholic Terrorism, Catholic Theocracy, Reproductive Choice, Reproductive Rights

Passage of contraceptives law in Philippines shows times have changed for Catholic church

Article by HRVOJE HRANJSKI , Associated Press

MANILA, Philippines – Twenty-six years after Roman Catholic leaders helped his mother marshal millions of Filipinos in an uprising that ousted a dictator, President Benigno Aquino III picked a fight with the church over contraceptives and won a victory that bared the bishops’ worst nightmare: They no longer sway the masses.

Aquino last month signed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 quietly and without customary handshakes and photographs to avoid controversy. The law that provides state funding for contraceptives for the poor pitted the dominant Catholic Church in an epic battle against the popular Aquino and his followers.

A couple with links to the church filed a motion Wednesday to stop implementation of the law, and more petitions are expected. Still, there is no denying that Aquino’s approval of the legislation has chipped away at the clout the church has held over Filipinos, and marked the passing of an era in which it was taboo to defy the church and priests.

Catholic leaders consider the law an attack on the church’s core values — the sanctity of life — saying that contraceptives promote promiscuity and destroy life. Aquino and his allies see the legislation as a way to address how the poor — roughly a third of the country’s 94 million people — manage the number of children they have and provide for them. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unwanted, according to the U.N. Population Fund, and a third of those end up aborted in a country where abortion remains illegal.

Rampant poverty, overcrowded slums, and rising homelessness and crime are main concerns that neither the church nor Aquino’s predecessors have successfully tackled.

“If the church can provide milk, diapers and rice, then go ahead, let’s make more babies,” said Giselle Labadan, a 30-year-old roadside vendor. “But there are just too many people now, too many homeless people, and the church doesn’t help to feed them.”

Labadan said she grew up in a God-fearing family but has defied the church’s position against contraceptives for more than a decade because her five children, age 2 to 12, were already far too many for her meager income. Her husband, a former army soldier, is jobless.

She said that even though she has used most types of contraceptives, she still considers herself among the faithful. “I still go to church and pray. It’s a part of my life,” Labadan said.

“I have prayed before not to have another child, but the condom worked better,” she said.

The law now faces a legal challenge in the Supreme Court after the couple filed the motion, which seems to cover more ideological than legal grounds. One of the authors of the law, Rep. Edcel Lagman, said Thursday that he was not worried by the petition and expected more to follow.

“We are prepared for this,” he said. “We are certain that the law is completely constitutional and will surmount any attack on or test of its constitutionality.”

Over the decades, moral and political authority of the church in the Philippines is perceived to have waned with the passing of one its icons, Cardinal Jaime Sin. He shaped the role of the church during the country’s darkest hours after dictator Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law starting in 1972 by championing the cause of civil advocacy, human rights and freedoms. Sin’s action mirrored that of his strong backer, Pope John Paul II, who himself challenged communist rulers in Eastern Europe.

Three years after Aquino’s father, Benigno Aquino Sr., a senator opposing Marcos, was gunned down on the Manila airport tarmac in 1983, Sin persuaded Aquino’s widow, Corazon, to run for president. When massive election cheating by Marcos was exposed, Sin went on Catholic-run Radio Veritas in February 1986 to summon millions of people to support military defectors and the Aquino-led opposition. Marcos fled and Aquino, a deeply religious woman, was sworn in as president.

Democracy was restored, but the country remained chaotic and mired in nearly a dozen coup attempts. The economy stalled, poverty persisted and the jobless were leaving in droves for better-paying jobs abroad as maids, teachers, nurses and engineers. After Aquino stepped down, the country elected its first and only Protestant president, Fidel Ramos. He, too, opposed the church on contraceptives and released state funds for family planning methods.

Catholic bishops pulled out all the stops in campaigning against Ramos’ successor, popular movie actor Joseph Estrada, a hero of the impoverished masses who made little attempt to keep down his reputation for womanizing, drinking and gambling.

But few heeded the church’s advice. Estrada was elected with the largest victory margin in Philippine history. Halfway through his six-year presidency, in January 2001, he was confronted with another “people power” revolt, backed by political opponents and the military, and was forced to resign.

His successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, styled herself as a devout Catholic and sought to placate the church by abolishing the death penalty and putting brakes on the contraceptives law, which languished in Congress during her nine years in power.

It mattered little. Arroyo’s mismanagement and corruption scandals set the stage for Aquino’s election on a promise to rid the Philippines of graft, fix the economy and lift millions out of poverty. The scion of the country’s democracy icon took power several years after Sin’s death, but it was a different era in which the church was battered by scandals of sexual misconduct of priests and declining family values.

The latest defeat of the church “can further weaken its moral authority at a time when this is most badly needed in many areas, including defense of a whole range of family values,” said the Rev. John J. Carroll, founding chairman of the Jesuit-run John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues. He said he wondered how many Catholics have been “turned off” by incessant sermons and prayers led by the church against the contraceptives law, and how much it contributed to rising anticlericalism and the erosion of church authority.

“People today are more practical,” said Labadan, the street vendor. “In the old days, people feared that if you defy the church, it will be the end of the world.”

Associated Press writers Jim Gomez and Teresa Cerojano contributed to this report.

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Catholic Crackpot Rick Santorum Joins The Hive of Uber-Lunacy at World Nut Daily!

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Crackpots, Catholic Crazies, Catholic Fanatic, Catholic Fanatics, Catholic Fascist Rick Santorum, Catholic Lunatics, Catholic Right, Rick Santorum, Rick Santorum Is Insane, World Net Daily, World Nut Daily

Rick Santorum Now Writing for World Net Daily: ‘The UN Wants to Kill My Daughter’
Former presidential candidate promptly pens crazy anti-UN rant
Rick Santorum has now joined the illustrious company of Pamela Geller, Jerome Corsi, and Joseph Farah, and is writing a regular column for one of the looniest wingnut sites on the web, the always inadvertently amusing World Net Daily, where they’re still totally certain that Barack Obama is a secretly gay radical Muslim atheist commie with a fake birth certificate.

Not a single one of those absurd adjectives is exaggerated. The people who write for this hive of lunacy really do believe that stuff, all of it, at the same time. Not to mention the creationism, the advocation of theocracy, the climate change denial, the insane raving homophobia, and the blatant nativism and racism. It’s a cornucopia of anti-rational far right kookery.

And Santorum’s first column for Weird Nuts Drooling fits right in; it’s a crazy rant about a United Nations treaty on the rights of disabled people that Santorum thinks is a secret conspiracy to subvert the US Constitution so they can kill his daughter.

Digging a bit deeper, the treaty has much darker and more troubling implications.

The most offensive provision is found in Section 7 of the treaty dealing specifically with children with disabilities. That section reads:

“In all actions concerning children with disabilities, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”

“The best interest of the child” standard is lifted out of a controversial provision contained in the 1989 treaty called the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. That treaty was never ratified in large part because of this provision.

“The best interest of the child” standard may sound like it protects children, but what it does is put the government, acting under U.N. authority, in the position to determine for all children with disabilities what is best for them. That is counter to the current state of the law in this country which puts parents – not the government – in that position of determining what is in their child’s best interest. Under the laws of our country, parents lose that right only if the state, through the judicial process, determines that the parents are unfit to make that decision.

In the case of our 4-year-old daughter, Bella, who has Trisomy 18, a condition that the medical literature says is “incompatible with life,” would her “best interest” be that she be allowed to die? Some would undoubtedly say so.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

Should somebody let Rick Santorum know that the Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that the Supremacy Clause says treaties like this one cannot supersede the US Constitution, or is it too funny to just let him keep ranting away?

It’s very illuminating to see Republicans like Santorum losing their shit over an overwhelmingly positive treaty that would greatly help the disabled people of the world; makes it very easy to see that gaping cavity in their chests where a heart is supposed to be.

Also see: Let’s Talk: The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities

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The Twisted Twins | Catholic Fascist Warmongers Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Buffoons, Catholic Crazies, Catholic Crusader Newt Gingrich, Catholic Crusaders, Catholic Empire, Catholic Fascist Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich Adulterer, Newt Gingrich Catholic Fascist

Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!!!!!!!  . . .   Bomb! Bomb Iran!!!!! (Christian Warmongers, Good Catholic Boys Div.)

by Rev. Paul McKay

SANTORUM & GINGRICH HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH TORTURE AND THE CASUAL DROPPING OF BOMBS THAT WILL DESTROY THE LIVES OF SCORES OF INNOCENT MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN; THESE ARE A COUPLE OF REALLY, REALLY VIOLENT, HATEMONGERING, WARMONGERING CATHOLICS AND WE CANNOT LET THESE PEOPLE GET US INTO ANOTHER CATASTROPHIC AND VIOLENT WORLD EVENT; SPEAK OUT, PEACEMAKERS: SPEAK OUT LOUD AND CLEAR AGAINST THIS MADNESS WITH ME

For Catholics who purport to care so deeply and passionately for the sanctity of life–for Catholics who claim to be all about the Catholic Church’s teachings–the Rick Santorums and Newt Gingriches of the world sure do talk casually about nuking people.

Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church were adamantly opposed to the mere invasion of Iraq, remember? So much so that the Pope dispatched an old Bush family friend and Catholic clergyman to try to persuade Bush that invading Iraq could in no way be justified on any Christian or moral grounds whatsoever.

At least President Bush heard out the old family Catholic friend before dismissing him with that typical Bush absolutism. (Absolutely to the right on war and peace.) Bush, a United Methodist (who left the Episcopal Church largely because of Laura’s Methodist ties and because “the Episcopalians kneel too much! he! he!”), turned a totally deaf ear to the United Methodist Bishops who joined every other mainline Protestant denomination in virtually begging him not to go venturing off on an unjust and unnecessary war.

Now, the Santorums and Gingriches of the world talk casually about dropping bombs–nuclear, no less–on Iran with no evidence to justify such draconian action (Ron Paul is right about that–walleyed crazy Ron Paul is right about a lot of things, not that I could ever vote for him except as a protest vote).

It seems to be lost on these Catholic politicos that their own Catholic Church, which they say they love and they defend so vigorously, extends the sanctity of life to all life–not just to life in the womb. It’s why the Vatican predictably speaks out loud and clear and justifiably every time there is a scheduled execution of a death row inmate in this country. It’s why the Vatican consistently opposes torture which Santorum and Gingrich have no prob with.

For all their problems and all the weird and twisted theology they have, in my humble opinion–as I noted in a recent posting, the theology of “every sperm is sacred” ain’t my deal–the Catholics at least are consistent on the sacredness of life and viewing a life as created in the very image of God. Santorum and Gingrich seem to think a lot of lives are born in the image of a literal Satan that doesn’t even literally exist (again, that opinion is my own humble and theologically informed opinion–send your nasty disagreements to revpaulmckay@gmail.com and put your name on your nastiness if you want to tell me how misguided a Christian I am because I don’t believe in a ridiculous literal Satan).

The Santorums and Gingriches speak as if they have no respect for their own church’s teachings and preachings whatsoever when they start fanning the flames of war. They speak of bombing without so much as any moral perspective. You won’t hear them say, “As much as I hate war, as much as I would tremble at the heavy responsibility of taking lives and wreaking havoc in the world, I would do it out of moral concern for the greater good of saving other lives.”

Nope, you won’t hear that kind of moral and Christian equivocating, acknowledging that people will suffer and die—living, breathing human beings outside of wombs–will be maimed if not killed and killed in the most gruesome way possible with nukes melting their bodies down. They won’t approach their violent positions on countries like Iran with any perspective on of the scores of innocent men, women and children who will be left starving, without shelter or clean water to subsist on.

And of course, they are clueless as to how kids growing up in Iran will see the U.S. as maybe being “the Great Satan” that their crazy ass dictator loud mouth clowns portrayed.

Kids in Iran want American Apple gizmos and cool blue jeans.

Bomb the country and kids in Iran will hate America’s guts because the Santorums and Gingriches didn’t give a shit if they and their loved ones lived or died.

I’m sorry, but Santorum and Gingrich are some really twisted sisters and haters.

And we can’t let the haters win.

Speak your voice.

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The Catholicization of the American Right

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Buffoons, Catholic Censorship, Catholic Crazies, Catholic Crusaders, Catholic Demagogues, Catholic Empire, Catholic Fanatic, Catholic Fanaticism, Catholic Fanatics, Catholic Fascism, Catholic Fascist, Catholic Fascists, Catholic Hitler, Catholic Inquisition, Catholic Lunatics, Catholic Power, Catholic Right, Catholic Supremacism

The Catholicization of the American Right

Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In the past two decades, the American religious Right has become increasingly Catholic. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. Literally, Catholic writers have emerged as intellectual leaders of the religious right in universities, the punditocracy, the press, and the courts, promoting an agenda that at its most theoretical involves a reclamation of the natural law tradition of Thomas Aquinas and at its most practical involves appeals to the kind of common-sense, “everybody knows,” or “it just is” arguments that have characterized opposition to same-sex marriage. There is nothing new about Catholic conservative intellectuals — think John Neuhaus, William F. Buckley, Jr. What is new is the prominence that these Catholic thinkers and leaders have come to have within the domains of American politics that are dominated by evangelical Protestants. Catholic intellectuals have become to the American Right what Jewish intellectuals once were to the American Left. In the academy, on the Court, Catholic intellectuals provide the theoretical discourse that shapes conservative arguments across a whole range of issues. Often these arguments have identifiable Thomistic or Jesuitical sources, but most of the time they enter the mainstream of political dialogue as simply “conservative.”

Meanwhile, in the realm of actual politics, Catholic politicians have emerged as leading figures in the religious conservative movement. Again, there is nothing new about Catholic political leaders nor Catholic politicians, although from Al Smith through John Kennedy they were more often Democrats than Republicans (Pat Buchanan is an exception). What is new is the ability of self-identified Catholic politicians to attract broad support from the among the evangelical Protestant religious right.

Rick Santorum is a case in point. Santorum’s is a specifically Catholic form of faith. The recent flap over contraception is only an example of a much deeper phenomenon. As observers have noted, he talks frequently about natural law, but rarely quotes the Bible directly — his arguments draw on a theologically informed view of the nature of the world, not a personal relationship with the text.

Indeed, in the past Santorum has been quite forthright about the fact that he does not look to the Bible for guidance, he relies quite properly on the guidance of the Church. There is obviously nothing wrong with that … but it sits very curiously with traditional Evangelical Protestant attitudes.

It is important not to overstate the significance of Santorum’s success. For all Santorum’s recent ascendancy, here is the breakdown of actual Republican votes cast thus far: Romney, 1,121,685; Gingrich, 838,825; Santorum, 431,926; Paul, 307,975. The count of awarded delegates produces a somewhat different result: Romney, 99; Santorum, 47; Gingrich, 32; Paul, 20 (The difference among those numbers reflects what political scientists call “malapportionment.”)  But two facts remain: one, with 1,144 delegates required for the nomination this thing is nowhere close to a resolution, and will not be even after Arizona, Michigan, and Super Tuesday; and, two, thus far in the Republican primary campaign, a majority of the votes cast have been for Catholic candidates. It’s not just Santorum; before him it was Gingrich, after all. At the national level, Catholic politicians have emerged as leading figures in the GOP… and  evangelical Protestants are flocking to follow their lead. Why?

The answer is not that evangelicals have become any less Protestant.  In a 2011 American Values Survey, 93% of white evangelicals say it is important for a candidate to have strong religious beliefs, versus 69% for Catholics saying the same thing. And 36% of white evangelical voters said they would be uncomfortable voting for a candidate who had strong religious beliefs that were different from their own, up from 29% in 2010, a change that may reflect the effects of a prominent Mormon candidate in the mix. In other words, evangelical voters care a great deal that a candidate’s religion accord with their own… and they are supporting Catholic candidates.  So what is going on?

To understand what is going on, we need to move from the role of Catholic individuals to a broader, more metaphorical idea of a Catholic style of political reasoning. “Catholic” in this exercise means responding to leadership; focusing on outcomes (think “doctrine of works”); and a Manichean view of the world in which the Church — as opposed to mere churches — stands as a bulwark against equally great opposing forces, so that outside the Church there can be only chaos. In this sense a Catholic Republican voter would be someone looking for a commanding general to lead Christian soldiers on a crusade, would care about a candidate’s policies rather than his soul, and respond to a call to view the Republican Party as the last bastion of civilisation in a howling wilderness.  Extending the metaphor, a “Protestant” conservative should reject the idea of leaders in favour of grass roots communalism; local self-direction in the congregationalist model; care about character and personal values more than specific stances or doctrines; and see the world as a mass of sinners who are to be judged  individually by the quality of their soul rather than by their enlistment in one party or the other.

In this metaphorical sense, the “Catholic” political style is strongest among evangelical Protestant voters, not actual Catholics. The eagerness of Catholic bishops to jump into a fight over contraception, for example, does not reflect that attitudes of their parishoners, but it gets strong support from evangelicals. Similarly, in one recent poll more than two-thirds of Catholic voters supported some sort of legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships, with 44% favoring same-sex marriage; in very sharp contrast, an outright majority of evangelical voters said there should be no legal recognition of a same-sex relationship.

In political terms, the evangelical Protestant Right has become Catholicized. They do not see Catholicism as a religion very different from their own because it leads to the same positions on the battlefield, call it Fortress GOP. It is a political worldview that is singularly well suited to negative politics. Who cares whether your guy is actually a bit of a nut-case or has some sleaze in his history if he will defeat the forces of darkness? Liberals tolerate venality in their candidates if they believe they will do good; “Catholic” conservatives tolerate venality if they believe their candidates will defeat evil.  (Ironically, all of this has moved the American religious Right in the direction of becoming more and more like a traditional European right-wing political movement, rather than a populist movement in the American Jacksonian tradition.)

In this metaphorical sense, the one person who did the most to push the Catholicization of conservative politics was Newt Gingrich back in the 1990s, long before his personal religious conversion. The most obvious illustration was the infamous GOPAC memorandum entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” that instructed Republican candidates to describe their Democratic opponents using words like “destructive,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “they/them,” “betray” and ” traitors” (relying on the research of the almost incomprehensibly amoral Frank Lutz). That kind of rhetoric and the scorched earth, anyone-who-is-not-with-must-be-destroyed tactics that go with it has been the defining style of Gingrich’s brand of politics ever since. And who Gingrich’s man in the Senate in those heady days of unabashed viciousness? Rick Santorum. And not just as an ally — Santorum was Gingrich’s hatchet man, the one who did the “dirty work” as one Republican congressman put it. Or in the words of a Republican staffer at the time, “[Santorum] is a Stepford wife to Gingrich… If you took the key out of his back, I’m not sure his lips would keep moving.” (These quotations appear in a 1995 Philadelphia Magazine article — you can find a link to the pdf file here

Can this carry Santorum to the nomination? Probably not. There are already signs that Santorum is slipping, as the extremity of his religious dogmatism becomes evident to voters, which may eventually force evangelicals to recognize the differences between the tenets of his faith and their own. The fit with Tea Party conservatives is even more tenuous, as that movement is an expression of a deeply “Protestant” brand of politics that sit uneasily with the rhetoric and worldview of “Catholic” conservatism. And Santorum has yet to be called out for his role in the 1990s; if people really want to vote for Gingrich’s old pet attack dog, why not simply vote for the owner? With time, Romney’s claim to be the only electable candidate (and adult) in the field may regain its traction. Meanwhile, Gingrich is looking ahead to the South, and possibly even as far as Texas and California. It has been a campaign of suddenly arising candidates who flamed out just as quickly, and Santorum shows signs of being the latest in that line — as I said, even after Super Tuesday there is going to be a long way to go.

There is the potential for deep divisions appearing in the GOP along an axis of “Protestant” versus “Catholic” religious conservatism. But regardless of what happens next, the rise of first Gingrich and now Santorum as the candidate of choice for the Religious Right is a profound sign of how Catholic the American religious right has become.

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Catholic Butthurt | Pop Star Possessed by Satan Say Catholic Fascists

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in Catholic Crazies, Catholic Fascists, Catholic League

Nicki Minaj, Satan and the Phenomenon of Christian Butthurt

If you didn’t watch the Grammy Awards on Sunday night, chances are you’ve probably heard about what you missed — Nicki Minaj’s bizarre performance of “Roman Holiday.”  I’m not going to take the time to describe the performance except to say that it resembled my idea of a lavish musical production of the 1974 Italian demon possession film Beyond the Door (which was a quick, tacky rip-off of the far superior 1973 film The Exorcist) as directed by Baz Lurhmann.  If you haven’t seen it, please watch the video here.

I rarely watch the Grammy Awards because music is something I prefer to listen to rather than watch on TV, and much of what makes up the show holds no interest for me.  But I watched this year because there were some performers I wanted to see — Adelle’s return after throat surgery and performances by Paul McCartney, Glenn Campbell (who won’t be with us much longer) and the Beach Boys.  I’m not a fan of Nicki Minaj, and in spite of its theatrical and pyrotechnical extravagance, I found the performance to be a big steaming bowl of nothing.  But as I watched it, I laughed loudly, turned to my wife and said, “Boy, this is going to infuriate people!”

I was right, of course, because as I began writing this only two hours after the west coast broadcast of the 54th Grammy Awards, the wailing and gnashing of teeth had already started on the internet.  The first sign of it I encountered was in the Washington Post, which listed several comments from Nicki Minaj fans on Twitter.  Here are a few samples:

“I don’t like the fact that Nicki Minaj brought religion into her song #notokay”

“I was expecting LL Cool J to do another Prayer after Nicki Minaj’s demonic performance. I still wish he had.”

“Open with a prayer to the Lord, end with an exorcism? SMH #Grammys.”

From there, I went to a website called DividedStates.com for an article titled “Nicki Minaj Performs Satanic Ritual No. 2 at Grammy’s to Top Satanic Superbowl Show.”

Wait … you didn’t know that Madonna’s halftime show at the Super Bowl was a Satanic ritual?  Whether or not the Super Bowl was Satanic probably depends on which team you were rooting for.  But it also depends on whether or not you embrace the notion that the music industry — like all of mass media in the United States and elsewhere — is (and has been for some time) under the control of the Illuminati — the deeply secret, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling, ultra-wealthy elite who either worship Satan, Moloch, or are reptilian aliens from outer space, depending on who you talk to — and is using the music industry to brainwash the masses and condition them for the coming antichrist dictatorship using subliminal messages, music videos filled with Satanic imagery and rituals, and songs that promote sex, drugs, sadomasochism, mind control, and check kiting … or something like that.  If you’d like to learn more about all of this, I refer you to The Vigilant Citizen, which is one of the most readable websites on the subject.

Back to the article on DividedStates.com.  It wastes no time in making precisely the kind of claims I expected:

“Nicki’s disturbing performance at the 53rd annual Grammy Awards was a blatant attack on the Catholic church.  No one is sure why she has such disdain for the Church but many actually believe she is simply evil and it [sic] reflected in everything she does and every song she sings and every performance she gives.”

Never mind that it’s the 54th Grammy Awards and that what “many actually believe” is given the weight of factual information here and that the article quotes people overheard at the Grammy Awards by an unidentified source (Catholic spies?  A spectral virgin Mary?).  The significant part of that paragraph is “a blatant attack on the Catholic church.”  That leads us to this later paragraph:

“If the stage was [sic] set as a Jewish Holocaust, or a black slavery set or some kind of mockery of Muhammad and Islam glorifying slave owners, there would be outrage.  But because its [sic] the Catholic church that Minaj is mocking, somehow it’s allowed.”

Now “outraged Catholics” are calling for a boycott of CBS because of Minaj’s performance.  Beneath the linked article at IndustryAllAccess.com, there is a comment from a reader identified as Dolores Ziga:

“shame on cbs..i would like them to put something offending muslims or another religion on ..i bet they wont..boycott cbs and nikki [sic].”

As expected, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League disagrees.  An article on the Catholic League’s website asks, “Is Nicki Minaj Possessed?”  In it, Donohue states:

“It’s bad enough that Catholics have to fight for their rights vis-à-vis a hostile administration in Washington without also having to fend off attacks in the entertainment industry.  The net effect, however, will only embolden Catholics, as well as their friends in other faith communities. … Whether Minaj is possessed is surely an open question, but what is not in doubt is the irresponsibility of The Recording Academy.  Never would they allow an artist to insult Judaism or Islam.”

Because as we all know, it’s practically illegal to be a Catholic in the United States today.  And if you think that, I have a bridge to sell you.  On Neptune.

As I traveled around the internet reading the reactions to Minaj’s performance, I was curious to know what else these websites had to say about religion.  I was especially curious to see if they had any coverage of the seemingly endless sex scandal in which the Catholic church had been mired for so long.  The open question in my mind was not whether or not Nicki Minaj is possessed, but whether or not the same outrage expressed over her performance had been expressed over the fact that the Catholic church has been protecting child rapists and even blaming everyone from the victims to gay people in its ongoing efforts to dodge responsibility for it horrifying actions for decades now (that we know of).  Guess what I found.  That’s right.  Not a damned thing.

Pay no attention to that child rapist behind the curtain!  We are the Great and Powerful Catholic Church and we have been OFFENDED by a musical performance!

Probably the most commonly found word in the responses to Minaj’s song is “disrespected.”  She disrespected Catholics.  That was her big crime.

The other common response is to claim that if the show had offended Jews or Muslims, if it had mocked the Holocaust or the slavery of black people in America’s past, it would not have been allowed.

This isn’t the first time such baseless and, frankly, crazy claims have been thrown at something that offends Catholics in particular or Christians in general.  It seems a lot of Christians believe that when someone disrespects or insults their religion or simply does something that they don’t like, it is an offense on the same moral level as mocking genocide and human slavery.  This boggles the minds of those of us who do not share that belief.

Expressing a negative opinion about a religion is not even in the same galaxy as mocking the systematic slaughter of millions of people, even if millions of people express that negative opinion.  That’s because it’s an opinion and not a network of gas chambers.  Having no respect for a religion does not breathe the same air as mocking the selling of human beings into slavery to live as cattle owned by other human beings.

And that performance does not make Nicki Minaj evil.  Hey, I know absolutely nothing about Minaj — for all I know, she tortures kittens and trips old people on the sidewalk.  If either of those were true, then that would make her a bad person.  Performing a musical number in which she portrays a young woman possessed by a demon while a priest and altar boys cavort on stage, no matter how weird or spooky or even bad it might have been, does not.

Let’s all keep in mind exactly what allegedly has been “disrespected” here.  We’re talking about the biggest organization of child rapists and their protectors on.  The.  PLANET.  Unlike the secretive cabal of Satanists that some believe have covertly taken control of the music industry, the Roman Catholic church’s apparent fondness for child rape is pretty much out in the open these days.  The pedophile is out of the bag now and we all know what the Catholic church is up to, and that is only made worse by its appalling attempts to dance around responsibility for its crimes.  None of this is speculation.  We now know — thanks to a damning 1997 letter from the Vatican — that the Catholic church enforces a global policy of protecting its child rapists from the law.

Right now, AIDS is leaving a swath of dying and dead people in its wake in Africa.  It is strangling the continent.  The Catholic church, however, has decided to keep telling African people not to use condoms because that’s part of Catholic dogma.  According to a 2010 article in the UK Guardian, this means the Catholic church is not just a religion — it has become “a major global health problem.”

Right now, the Catholic church in particular and Christianity in general is engaged in an all-out war against women — not Catholic or Christian women but all women.  In addition to its constant efforts to oppose legal abortion, Christians are actively fighting the availability of affordable birth control and health care for women.  They don’t care that not all of these women believe as they do — they insist that all women of all religious beliefs — and no religious beliefs — bend to their religious laws.

In return for its demands that everyone live according to its beliefs, the Catholic church in particular and Christianity in general also demand that everyone remain absolutely respectful of everything they do, that everyone refrain from questioning or criticizing their activities, no matter how illegal or horrifying, because they have god on their side.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in their god — if you have nothing to good to say about their religion, you are expected to remain silent.  This attitude is found throughout Christianity in the United States, where Christians are currently in a perpetual state of being butthurt because everyone in the country simply refuses to behave precisely as they wish.

Remember the comment by Dolores Ziga at IndustryAllAccess.com?  She wrote, “I would like them to put something offending Muslims or another religion on.”  This is a common attitude.  If Christians are offended by something, they then express a passionate desire for other religions to be offended by something — after all, that would be the fair thing, right? — and they get angry if they aren’t.  It’s kind of a “do unto others as we think you’re doing unto us” thing.  They’re keeping score.  Of course, this attitude of fairness vanishes in a puff of spoiled, whining, righteous indignation whenever an attempt is made to be inclusive of all beliefs in the United States.  The law requires that religious displays on government property — during the holidays, for example — be open to all religions or no religions.  That pisses Christians off.  They see themselves as the rulers of the roost in the U.S.  They believe this is their turf and they don’t want it sullied by any false religions with their false gods, or by secularists with their godlessness.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”  Preventing that requires constant vigilance in a free society — vigilance that, over the decades, has not been maintained here in the United States of Jesus, where Christians are still — in 2012, for crying out loud! — trying to control everyone, whether they are Christian or not.  They are still able to ask, out loud and with a straight face, if someone is possessed by demons.  They are still oblivious — intentionally or otherwise — to the problems and pain their religion causes for so many, of the lives it damages, and even the lives it ends in certain parts of the world.

This is due in part to the unwritten law that still remains in effect in the United States.  It is slowly weakening, but it has not yet gone away.  That unwritten law states that it is absolutely forbidden to question or criticize religion, that blind faith in unprovable invisible beings and forces, alternate histories, and anti-scientific explanations for the origins of human beings, the earth and the universe is a virtuous and sacred thing that must always be shown the utmost respect and remain above reproach.  According to this unwritten law, religious believers are like sleepwalkers and it would be wrong to wake them in the course of their somnambulistic wanderings.

Look where this unwritten law has gotten us.  We currently have Christian presidential candidates who openly believe that birth control should be outlawed, that sexual activity should be legally regulated, that gay people should be jailed for their sexuality, that women should shut the hell up and stay in the kitchen where they belong, that miscarriages should be investigated to see if they were induced.  This isn’t just annoying.  This isn’t just troubling.  This is fucking insanity!  The United States is a nation currently undergoing what appears to be a nervous breakdown!  And it’s a breakdown that might have been prevented had it not been for that unwritten law.

I do not recognize the authority of that unwritten law and I have no problem questioning, criticizing and even ridiculing the most destructive and dehumanizing force on the face of the earth.  So I would like the attention of outraged Christians for a moment.  I would like to have a word with you about Nicki Minaj’s performance.

There is a very good reason why Minaj did what she did Sunday night, why other artists have done similar things in the past and why others will continue to do them in the future.  She did it for attention, to cause controversy, to sell records, and to get publicity, and to achieve those things, she focused her performance on Catholicism because Christians are one of the most effective free marketing tools in the world.

Immediately after Minaj’s performance Sunday night — hell, during her performance! — Christians began promoting it on the internet.  Oh, sure, they were complaining about it, venting what they perceived to be righteous indignation.  But in doing that, they were promoting the performance.  One of the most beloved singers in the world died the night before the Grammy Awards, but what was everyone talking about?  Nicki Minaj.  Why?  Because Catholics in particular and Christians in general made sure of it.

Although you don’t seem to be aware of it, your religious beliefs combined with your attitude of entitlement in the United States make you extremely easy to manipulate and use.  Even I do it — just for amusement!  For example, I have, in the past, calculated my purchase in a store to total $6.66 just to watch the cashier freak the hell out because — well, I don’t know, maybe because he or she thinks the cash register is the antichrist.  I was raised a Christian.  I know where all your buttons are and how to push them, and so do a lot of other people, because your belief not only makes you easy to manipulate and extremely predictable — it makes you pretty damned funny.  That’s right, funny.  If you don’t want people to mock your religion, quit being so damned funny.

How can you do this?  By wising up!  Stop taking the bait!  Stop doing what most people know you will do when your buttons are pushed.  This requires a little more than just wising up — it requires growing up.

You are not the only religion in the world.  You are not the biggest religion in the world.  There are many other religions and they are no funnier or sillier than yours.  To those of us with no religious beliefs, it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart.  Even your religion is not unified — there are over 30,000 different versions of Christianity because even you can’t agree on what you believe.  Only in the last thirty years or so have you decided to take a break from your constant in-house feuding to band together and instead turn on everyone else — but you’re still accusing some among you of being “un-Christian” or “cults,” like the Mormons.

If you don’t like what Nicki Minaj did on Sunday night, the most effective thing you possibly could do would be to IGNORE HER!  If you ignored the Nicki Minajes and Lady Gagas and Madonnas, they would have to find another way to stir controversy, get attention and promote their work, and they most likely would leave your beliefs alone.

But you won’t do that because you enjoy your outrage too much.  You actually seem to get off on the idea that your religious rights are being smothered and you are being persecuted, even if those things aren’t happening — and despite the claims of your religious and political leaders, they aren’t.  Because you seem to enjoy your outrage so much, I have a few suggestions.  First of all, try focusing your outrage on some real problems.

Get outraged about the fact that your priests, bishops, pastors, deacons and teachers keep raping children and your churches keep protecting them.  The Catholic church gets most of the attention in this particular field of endeavor, but the fact is that all religion is prime hunting ground for child predators because the predators know if they’re caught, the church — whether it’s Catholic or Baptist or Methodist or Seventh-day Adventist or Mormon — will protect them rather than letting unflattering news about the church go public.

Seriously, doesn’t that outrage you?  If not, why not?  Why are some of you still sending your children to Catholic schools, for example?  Why are you handing your children over to Child Rapists R Us?  Why are you still putting money in the offering plate to fund this systematic rape of children and protection of the rapists?

Get outraged about the fact that so many teenagers who are gay or are perceived as gay are bullied and tormented to the point of suicide because Christian leaders keep spreading outright lies about gay people!  Get outraged about the fact that so many Christian churches and organizations are adamantly opposed to any efforts to address and quash this behavior!  They claim its an attack on their religious rights when really, it’s an attack on their right to bully and torment gay people!  If you think homosexuality is wrong, then don’t engage in it.  Stop trying to control others who don’t feel the same way about it.

Get outraged because so many people are dying in Africa because the Catholic church and other Christian organizations keep lying about condoms!

Get outraged

The Catholic League is Catholic Fascism

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