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Vatican Officials: This Intolerance of Our Intolerance Will Not Be Tolerated

The Vatan's Cathological Loop Holes

To see the article on it's original Daily Dolt page, click here.

As Jesus said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged," pausing to add "But seriously, no homo."

As Jesus said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged," pausing to add "But seriously, no homo."

Vatican officials are pushing back against what they see as increasing intolerance toward Christians. Specifically, the Church is speaking out against one of the most pernicious forms of oppression in the world today: homophobia-phobia.  As tweeted from the Vatican Secretariat of State’s official Twitter account recently:

 

The Secretariat’s tweet follows a similar statement from Bishop Mario Toso earlier this month during his delivery of the Holy See’s address to  the High Level Conference on Tolerance and Non-discrimination:

Intolerance in the name of tolerance cannot be condoned.

Finally, the Vatican is speaking truth to power. 

One can only hope that someday, Christians will no longer be forced to hide who they are, living in the cultural closet, unable to come out to their friends and family as a member of the largest religious group on earth. But with only 2.1 billion other Christians out there, how can they absolutely, definitely, without a doubt know they’ll be safe?

Sadly, as Toso went on to explain, many Christians are still being forced to repress their evangelic urges:

[Christians in the] 21st century are now being forced to choose between two impossible scenarios: they can abandon their faith and act against their conscience, or resist and face losing their livelihood.

This decision Toso describes of being forced to choose between what one knows in one’s heart to be true and what society says to do —  this is something gays could never understand. Unlike being gay, Christianity is not a choice. Some people are simply born that way.

As Toso further lamented, while Christians today are still technically allowed to worship as they wish, they are not permitted to act out all of their religious beliefs all of the time. Perhaps more disturbing, many Christians cannot even condemn other people’s behavior during a public discourse without their own behavior being condemned:

It is regretful … that … a sharp dividing line has been drawn between religious belief and religious practice, so that Christians are frequently reminded in public discourse (and increasingly even in the courts), that they can believe whatever they like in their own homes or heads, and largely worship as they wish in their own private churches, but they simply cannot act on those beliefs in public. This is a deliberate twisting and limiting of what religious freedom actually means…

Ultimately, religious freedom must be paramount, which means that my religious right to discriminate against you outweighs your secular right to not be discriminated against by me.  That’s because my religious beliefs are correct — not on the basis of any effect they have on actual human rights, but because they’re derived from God, who pretty much nails it every time (being right is kind of his specialty).

Likewise, if gays formed some kind of gay church of their own, then their religious freedom would also be paramount. If they wanted, the leaders of this hypothetical gay church could keep the truly religious men and women apart from each other so they could focus on having same-sex interactions. In this craaaazy gay church we’re imagining, the monasteries would be full of gay men and the nunneries would be full of lesbians, and since it’s gay and all, they’d probably focus disproportionately on what you do with your genitals. Those pervs. Religion is right and gayness is weird; so until gay Jesus sticks his resurrerection all up in our face, in the name of tolerance, intolerance must be tolerated. Amen.

What’s Latin for “Irony”?