I am very, very tired of Da Bishops telling us about the good and proper use of sexytimes. For starters, it's going to be another 40 years before the Catholic Church gets any credibility back on issues of the sexytimes at all, because
things, and even aside from
things there's the larger issue of the modern church (my old church, etc., and so on) obsessing publicly over sexytimes to the exclusion of all else. All that stuff about the sick and the poor, that's a near footnote, but if you believe Da Bishops, the entire point of almost every single book in the Bible is to properly delineate the do's and do not's and really do not's of sexytimes. When you've got the church hierarchy engaged in Sunday Talk against (1) abortion, (2) birth control, (3) insurance ramifications of birth control, (4) insurance ramifications of private employers on birth control, (5) insurance ramifications of insurance that is being provided for free to employees of private religious employers obsessed about (1-4), oh and
also (6) let's just pipe in on gay marriage here because we're also experts on everybody else's sex lives on the entire planet, that's what these little white collars signify, or something.
Anyway, so here's Cardinal Dolan on This Week talking about how he'd tell gay couples that they're sinners and the federal government itself needs to discriminate against them because Cardinal Timothy, Issuer of Proper Bedroom Permits for things, says so:
Well, the first thing I’d say to them is, “I love you, too. And God loves you. And you are made in God’s image and likeness. And – and we – we want your happiness. But – and you’re entitled to friendship.” But we also know that God has told us that the way to happiness, that – especially when it comes to sexual love – that is intended only for a man and woman in marriage, where children can come about naturally.
Oh, damn, we've got quite the concession from the big-wig. Gay Americans are entitled to "friendship." Well, thank God for that, if for no other reason than trying to enforce a strict no-friendship rule among all gay people everywhere sounds like more work than even the good Cardinal could find time for.
You know what? Fine, whatever! So don't marry them in the Catholic Church! We're not talking about the Catholic Church, we're not talking about the (oh-so-often-ignored) leadership of the Catholic Church, we're not talking about whether or not you think gay people should just-be-friends or are allowed to register for a nice silverware set, we don't care. We're only talking about whether the federal government, the secular, non-denominational government of these 50 states has any good reason to not grant two men or two women the same legally binding partnership rights as other lifelong couples get, and whenever your argument against that hinges not just in part, but in totality on what your personal Bible says about such things, you lose. You lose because my Bible says differently, and an atheist's non-Bible says yet another thing, and we're still not quite so stupid as to turn all of American governance into a Bible fight because everybody, everywhere knows how that crap turns out, once tried, and only a vanishingly small set of crackpots wants the next round of history books to have a chapter devoted to the American cleansing or the purge or the even more final solution or whatever horse's ass of a name the next self-appointed deciders of The Only True Faith decided to call it.
We're done here, various important people from The Churches. You get to be in charge of what people in your religions are supposed to think, and I get to be in charge of what ex-Catholics who share the same social security number as myself thinks, and that guy down the road, I think his name is Jim, gets to decide what Jim thinks, and if literally the only resulting problem with that stance is that some sub-collection of somebodies, somewhere, thinks me or Jim or Cardinal Timothy Dolan is living in sin, in the abstract sense of things, we are doing a damn fine job of things. We can only dream of a day in which all big national decisions have the absolute dearth of substantive negative consequences that allowing marriage equality will have. If your big argument against it is is that your personal religion's much-obsessed-over and humiliatingly degraded preachings on "sexual love" ought to hold sway over the secular governance of all other Americans because you think God told you so, period, that's just plain not an argument at all.