An Excellent Article from the Guardian and Andrew Brown on Why the Popes don't have a Clue on Where or How to Stick It Regarding Sex and Humanity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/jul/30/catholic-attitudes-gay-sex-homosexuality

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No Dolan-style Charity from the Vatican to Nuns who Talk about Shhh! (sex) – Sister Margaret Farley

The Vatican is attacking a retired theologian nun, Sister Margaret Farley, for her book on human sexuality published in 2006.

At Amazon.Com: 

Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," by Sister Margaret Farley

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Love-Framework-Christian-Sexual/dp/0826429246

Can’t have women let alone nuns define what the Vatican Penis Cult is only allowed to define in what to do with your naughty parts etc. 

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http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/157502835.html?page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue

Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex. 

Fruitfulness need not "refer only to the conceiving of children," she writes. "It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others" rather than just succumbing to "an egoisme a deux." (“Love is a selfishness of two.”) 

The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty" outside of marriage or procreation, or on one's own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are "deviant," and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense. 

This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests "as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood." 

Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was "charity," not "payoffs." But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe "charity" is not the word that would come to mind.Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Farley's opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified. 

"Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out," she writes. 

If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style "charity." 

Roman Empire Was Not Green

Don’t mistake later memes on the timeline.  Don’t insult Jews or early Christians with the lording over the animals in a wrong way now, as opposed to original context in Genesis.

One of the themes I have come to in my research and writing is that the Roman Empire was not Green.

Rome hated nature as evidenced by its military, numbers only, Julian calendar that abandoned the moon and or feminine (balanced) concept connected to nature.

By turning sex into a body function to serve the state, Rome, like the present Roma Nova American/European empire culture and its Roman Church, has turned sex into a commodity to be monitored, censored, taxed and exploited.

If Christianity is to survive in the west, it must go to its pre-Constantine roots and adore the abundance of gifts of a loving God to her children and abandon the reptilian chaos and natural imbalance caused by the Roman military mind.

Ref: Terry Weldon on Catholic Magisterial Teaching about Human Sexuality: Animal Considerations

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Stupak-Pitts anti-female Amendment and the Need for The Equal Rights Amendment

The House health care reform bill got narrowly passed on Saturday with one minor amendment that with all the legal jargon and loopholes would effectively ban all abortion in any health care plan nationwide that receives government subsidies.

Think of all the money Insurance Companies will save abolishing this one medical procedure used only by women. While I do not see this as passing in any final Senate House Bill, I am reminded by the indecency of this amendment of another amendment, the sleeping Equal Rights Amendment and it only needing three more states to ratify it.

It is time to stop all this medieval anti-female religious and political discrimination in this country!

It is time for equal rights in health care!

It is time to turn the table on these sniveling conspiring bunch of brain dead anti-female fundamentalists!

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

There are various things happening with that equal rights amendment. It is not dead. It only needs a bunch of angry women and gays to push for its gender neutral language to guarantee anything having to do with SEX. I think that in today’s realistic worldview that includes sexual orientation and Gay marriage along with physical gender.

Equal Rights Amendment

An article by three law students, published in the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law in 1997 explained a legal rationale for the "three-state strategy." It argued that:

1. The 35 ratifications from state legislatures during the 1970s remain valid;

2. Rescissions of prior ratifications are not constitutional;

3. The 1978 extension of the ERA's deadline demonstrates that Congress can amend previously established deadlines; and

4. The Twenty seventh Amendment's more than 202 year ratification period set a standard of "sufficiently contemporaneous"—a term used during the U.S. Supreme Court's 1921 ruling in Dillon v. Gloss—giving Congress the power to set time limits on constitutional amendments. Dillon v. Gloss was later modified by Coleman v. Miller, which is also a basis for the three state strategy.

The article further reasoned that because Article V of the Constitution gives the Congress the power to propose amendments to the Constitution—and including changing aspects of the ratification process itself— that if and when three additional states ratify the ERA, the Congress has the power to deem the ERA properly ratified and duly added to the Constitution.

That Celibacy Thing

There is this nagging question at the back of my brain every time I read the NT. This thing about celibacy is a stated or a verbal contract, a vow promising not to marry. If you are not married, you cannot have legitimate children. Your bastards will have no claim on your estate. Your estate as a priest will go to the church. Any property temporarily in your name as head of a parish will not get confused with your estate should you die in between the time the widow gives you a deed and you record it in the parish church’s name.

Legitimacy used to matter a lot especially with royalty and in the old days. These days with DNA testing, even if Pops is a priest, you go for the estate claim.

Celibacy is not chastity. Chastity is a promise or vow not to have sex. I know this might sound confusing to some. The whole celibacy issue on the public stage uses one word with two entirely different meanings. Rather than get too technical, and God forbid there be allowed any in depth questioning of the religious clerics on stage that might be there to answer questions, a muddled cross connotation of facts is represented by the upfront PR word "celibacy" to describe the whole idiotic RC church thing about religious sexual and taboo practices.

Celibacy is more a general rule thing for priests. It is more for the local diocese thing.

Chastity is more a religious group or religious order thing. If so many men are living together in a monastery, then the no sex rule would hopefully mean no practice of sodomy.

Part of the demise of great numbers of Catholics and Parishes since Vatican II has been first and foremost the dwindling number of men willing to give up a normal life and put on a cassock and play the celibate / no sex game.

They say that Jesus did not marry. They say Jesus was in fact married to Mary Magdalene. Peter the so called first pope was married and had many children. Even though there is this proselytizing thing in scripture from time to time to give up everything and go out on the road and drum up new business, this life time withdraw from life, living, sex and family is not properly presented in the cut and paste gospels that were assembled decades or even rewritten in some parts centuries after the life of Jesus.

Jesus was most likely an orthodox Jew. At an early age he probably was wed in a marriage arranged by his parents. Whether he stayed married was another issue. Divorce in his time was a frequent thing and not unlike the Islamic thing in a traditional sense.

In any case, while Jesus was on the road he did not want his mostly male followers to say that they could not go on the road because the kid was sick etc.

Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law. Marriage was not necessarily part of the law but the law encompassed every aspect of a daily Jewish life.

Celibacy is a later invention after Jesus. It probably comes from some Jewish or Hellenistic cult thing and definitely was not part of the law or traditions that Jesus came to fulfill.