Nov. 27, 2006
 
MANN TALK: The Vatican Panders to Ignorance of Faithful
 
By Perry Mann
 
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – News Item: “VATICAN CITY --- The Vatican asked Israel Wednesday to ban a gay pride parade this week in Jerusalem, saying the march in the city considered holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians would offend the faithful.”
 
The news item reveals that the Holy See reiterates that freedom of expression is not without limitations, particularly when it would “offend the religious sentiments of believers and prove offensive to the great majority of Jews, Muslims and Christians, given the sacred character of the city of Jerusalem.”
 
Vatican teaching, one learns from the item, holds that homosexuals are “intrinsically disordered” and learns: “In 2000, the Vatican bitterly denounced a gay pride festival in Rome as an ‘insult’ to Christians.”
 
Why such an eruption of concern from the Vatican over a parade of people who love those of the same sex? Why would such a parade offend the religious sentiments of Jews, Muslims and Christians?
 
The answer is that Jewish scribes who were heterosexuals wrote Old Testament scripture and tainted it with their homophobia and attributed that homophobia to God, thus, giving hatred of gays divine sanction. And further St. Paul introduced homophobia into the New Testament, giving more support to the inherent prejudice of bigots against gays and giving more support to the belief that God hates gays---a hate never expressed or even hinted in all the words spoken by the Son of the God of the New Testament.
 
Pertinent to this issue is a quote from “Paul: The Mind of the Apostle,” a book by A. N. Wilson, renowned British biographer: “Again we have to admit that [Paul] was horrified by lesbianism, but so he was by male homosexuality. Paul’s views of homosexuality are well known: ‘God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with the passion for one another. ‘”
 
More from Wilson on Paul: “Though a Jew of Jews---by his own account---he had the most cavalier view even of the written word of God. It sometimes amuses me to note modern evangelical Christians poring over the works of Paul as if they were Holy Writ. Over some of the questions which preoccupy the modern church, such as the admissibility of women to orders or the allowability of homosexual practices, these good evangelicals will produce phrases of Paul’s to enforce their arguments one way or another, as if Paul’s letters were ‘Scripture’ in the sense of the Torah being ‘Scripture’. This is what Paul’s letters were destined to become in later ages of Christendom, in fact, remarkably soon after his death. But when he wrote his letters, they were all occasional pieces, in response to particular needs and queries which had arisen among his friends and converts.”
 
That is, Paul’s letters and his views therein are not God’s views. They are Paul’s views. To quote him and claim that one is quoting God is a tenuous presumption designed to give one’s argument and prejudice God’s stamp of approbation. That there is a God is questionable and that he is male, heterosexual and hates homosexuals is as likely as a “teapot orbiting Mars.”
 
Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist, was asked: Is believing in God like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars? His answer was “Yes.” And this: “For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything.” That is, in Dawkins’ estimation there is no Designer or God as perceived by believers.
 
What can one reasonably conclude from the above quotes and comments? One can conclude that the Vatican and the Holy See look to the Jewish Bible and to Paul, a mortal with many of the shortcoming of mortals, and to their own prejudices, to appeal to Israel to ban the parade and to establish that for gays to parade is an insult and offense to them and their followers. Further that the sensitivities of gays do not matter and that gays should have their rights restricted in deference to the feelings of religionists. That is, that gays are morally “intrinsically disordered” people and politically second-class citizens. And the presumptions upon which the religionists’ arguments are premised are questionable at best and baseless at worst.
 
The Vatican has in fact sought to restrict the civil rights of gays on religious grounds. Imagine the outrage provoked in the Vatican were Israel or America to restrict the rights of clerics to preach that homosexuality is an intrinsic disorder, a sin condemned and hated by God and an orientation offensive to heterosexual Jews, Muslims and Christians.
 
The Vatican and the Holy See have pandered to ignorance and bigotry of religionists everywhere. They have encouraged and inspired homophobes world wide to discriminate against and even to do violence to perhaps millions of gays everywhere. They have done so in God’s name. Shame, I say. They should ponder the question: Were the Second-Coming to occur on the day of the parade, where would Christ be doing: railing against it or marching in it?