Michelangelo Signorile: Vatican Values: Homosexuality ‘Disordered,’ Lying Totally Fine

Michelangelo Signorile has a wonderful piece in HuffPo Gay Voices, about the Roman Catholic Church’s recent actions towards  Sister Margaret Farley’s book Just Love. He details so well the hypocrisy this action.

But what should be shocking is how this contrasts with the Vatican’s response to the recent revelation that Cardinal Dolan of New York lied about having paid off pedophile priests. He called the charges “false and preposterous” years ago when they were first made, but tax documents obtained by The New York Times reveal that he paid $20,000 to hush up one priest and make him go quietly. Dolan refused to respond to the facts of the story, saying it was “useless and counterproductive” to do so because The New York Times is supposedly biased against the church. And there’s been no official response from the Vatican, which seems perfectly fine with lying if it’s in the service of protecting the church’s own horrendous actions and abdication of responsibility in the face of the child-abuse scandal. Let’s not forget that only a few months ago New York’s prior archbishop, Cardinal Egan, rescinded the church’s apology for the child-abuse scandal.

Like it or not, we are in a holy war when it comes to our fight for LGBTQ Rights, Women’s Rights and all that that entails. Holy but not moral, given the hypocrisy. Why is that bearing false witness is acceptable, forget about those commandments, right?

So, the battle isn’t holy in the sense of being “with God” or even “with Religion,” in the biggest sense of the term, but rather, this is the last and desperate attempts by a group of human beings in Rome to control the lives of others in the name of their religion.

Personally, I don’t care of religious people think I am going to hell for being gay. And, if they want to keep me out of their church, I can live with that too. But when their actions are all about animus, hate and discrimination, while they happily break other moral teachings… for me that’s a problem.

We don’t often place our struggles in the context of a religious war, yet I think it is, and we must begin to recognize that. All of the efforts to squelch our rights grow from the desire of a few to dominate us with their own self-righteous rules while they flagrantly abuse other so-called religious rules.

via Michelangelo Signorile: Vatican Values: Homosexuality ‘Disordered,’ Lying Totally Fine.