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The paranoid
Pope
What are we to make of
Joseph Ratzinger’s latest condemnation of
gays, in which he said that man needed
protecting from homosexuality just as much
as the tropical forests needed protecting
from destruction?
George
Broadhead has been looking at the
Pope’s pronouncement, and pronounces it
paranoid.
The Pope’s latest
homophobic outburst is clear evidence of
paranoia. And the
Pink Triangle Trust
(PTT) said as much in its
well-received news release in December,
after Pope Ratzinger had declared that
saving humanity from homosexual behaviour
was as important as saving the rainforests
from destruction.
“The
church has a responsibility for creation,”
he said in a holiday address to the
Curia, the Vatican’s central administration,
“and must demonstrate this responsibility
publicly [. . .] It must also protect man
against destruction by himself. It is
necessary for there to be something like an
ecology of man. This is not an outdated
metaphysics, if the Church speaks of the
nature of the human being as man and woman
and asks that this order of creation be
respected.”
Ratzinger
went on, “Here we are dealing with the fact
of faith in the Creator and paying attention
to the language of creation, the
disrespecting of which would be a
self-destruction of man and thus destruction
of the work of God. What is often understood
by the word ‘gender’ finds its resolution in
the auto-emancipation of man from creation
and from the Creator.
Man wants
to [. . .] control everything that concerns
him. But in this way he lives against the
creator. The tropical forest deserves our
protection, but no less than man as creation
[. . .]”
Outrageous
and bizarre
This must be the most
outrageous and bizarre claim yet made by the
Pope, who has already got a well-deserved
reputation as one of the most viciously
homophobic world leaders on a par with Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad of Iran and Robert Mugabe of
Zimbabwe.
The Vatican has already
reinforced its antigay reputation by
strongly opposing a UN declaration calling
for an end to discrimination against gays
(see “World Watch”), but this latest papal
outburst is clear evidence of an obsession
about homosexuality, which is tantamount to
paranoia.
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Pope
Paranoid:
Natzinger
preaches hate. |
I was pleased to see that
the PTT’s news release was picked up by a
fair few outlets among the gay press and the
Independent (see links below), and my
colleague Andy Armitage featured a (rather
irreverent)
piece on the Pink Triangle blog,
which seized on the Pope’s call for
responsibility and said, “Ratzo is a fine
one to talk of ‘responsibility’. The
responsibility is on humans not to
procreate at the moment, not to have
as many babies as it’s humanly possible to
have. These people obviously find it hard to
see that the planet is burgeoning with life,
and it’s becoming unsustainable.”
Shameful
Ratzinger had spoken of
the “destruction of God’s work”, which the
blog thought was shameful:
“As for that ‘destruction
of God’s work’, this is just gratuitously
insulting. Ratzo really should hang his head
in shame – better still, do the decent thing
and shoot himself.
“Trouble is, one puff of
white smoke and there will be an equally
bigoted excuse for a human being to take his
place. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the media
didn’t continue to legitimise his comments
by treating them as news, without severely
bollocking him in their leader columns.”
The leader of Roman
Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal
Cormac Murphy-O’Connor,
claimed the Pope’s words were being
misinterpreted and “difficult to interpret”,
but I fail to see how else one might
interpret the view that gay men are
destroying God’s work by following their
nature and, as they say, doing what comes
naturally.
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The Pope, a
former Hitler Youth member,
demonstrated his Nazi-esque ideology
when he said in his Xmas message
that
gays pose a threat to mankind.
©
Scott/Pink
Paper. |
When Ratzinger says, “The
tropical forests do deserve our protection”
followed by, “But man, as a creature, does
not deserve any less”, how is that to be
interpreted except as a statement that
mankind deserves our protection as much as
the rainforests do, and that protection is
against homosexuality?
The PTT’s response was
widely covered, including by the
Independent,
Pink Paper,
Rainbow Network,
Pink News and
IHEU.
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