Same Sex Marriage in the UK

It would be really pleasant to be able to ignore the teacup storms whipped up by the religious over issues to do with modern society. These storms take on the appearance of tsunamis and distract everyone from the serious business at hand in running a country. Like repealing very, very expensive loopholes in legislation that are abused by the rich including the Queen. But that’s another story.

Keithie O'Brien in colourful drag

Looking at this photo of The Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in the dioceses of St Andrews and Edinburgh and leader of the Church in Scotland in all his gloriously coloured pomp and ceremonial robes and mitre, I hope I can be forgiven for chuckling at Tim Minchin’s naughty Pope Song and the cartoon video that accompanied it. The video and the song went viral during and after the Pope’s visit in September 2010. The clergy were unusually silent about our Tim.

http://vimeo.com/11338327

Things must be moving too fast for religious dogma that is driven by age-old and static texts. Well, if not static (who reads original languages these days) then with essential tenets unchanged for millennia.

It is terribly hard lines for the Catholics in modern western society. Not only aren’t they allowed to hide the egregious and utterly inappropriate behaviour of a fair sized percentage of their clerics and other enforcers, they are having difficulty staying focussed on anything anymore. It’s raining in on them from all sides. The brickbats, slings and arrows just keep flying.

Cardinal Keithie O’Brien has made some amazingly silly and inconsistent claims this week over the intention of the UK government to legalise marriage for our homosexual community. He can be pretty offensive too.

Apparently the Roman Catholics in the England and Wales number about 5 million (hard to know for sure because of self identification). The population of England and Wales totals about 55 million.

It isn’t only the good Cardinal who has his knickers in a knot (maybe that’s the problem) but the Archbishop of Westminster, Most Rev. Vincent Nichols is on record with the same sort of complaint. At least he looks a little more like a person rather than a caricature, at least in this photo. Mind you, he can dress up too and looks quite like all other Archbishops.

Vinnie Nichols in his dog collar

There is a very good blog called Left Foot Forward with this article as a history lesson for the good Cardinal.

I understand that it would be very odd of them and the flurry of religious leaders on this island if they welcomed gay unions with open arms. Maybe they feel they have to stand up for their anachronistic organisations; after all they are paid by their churches and job loyalty ensures tenure of position.

Edit (7Mar) There are a couple of articles that I have found here from Stephen Hough in the Telegraph and here from the National Secular Society. Both articles are worth 50 of the articles from the religious.

My proposal is this:

The Registrar of Birth, Deaths and Marriages already registers births and deaths prior to any celebratory or funereal mourning ceremonies that may or may not ensue. Enable legislation that nominates the Registry as the sole registering body for all hatches, matches and despatches. Everyone who wants to marry can apply for the registration of their union with the registry and then go off and celebrate until the cows come home or they fall over, whichever comes first. However, it does create a level playing field for the registration of marriage. Make it secular first, religious afterwards like Births and Deaths.

Someone queried the white wedding and young girls’ desire to have the purported biggest day of their lives being lost in the greyness of the Registry.

Not so I pointed out. My marriage (ahem, the second formal one) was held at the Registry in St. Andrews (a pleasanter spot you’ll never find) with flowers, a new outfit, music and a delightful woman who conducted the process. During the war, many couples were married at Registry offices. Prior to the war and many moons prior to Christianity or Judaism and definitely prior to Islam, marriage ceremonies were held in fields, buildings, homes, beaches and in woodlands. All very charming and full of good cheer and well wishes for the couple, I am sure. In Perth, Australia, my son and his wife were married in King’s Park by a celebrant from the Humanists.

At St Andrews Registry Office - the old Mayor's Room

Why do the Christians feel they have the right to try to continue to punch beyond their weight and take the government to task on this issue? It seems to have something to do with their definition of the word marriage. They want it defined as in the umpteenth version or edition or translation of their holy book. The King James Version was published in 1611 and that is probably the one they use – very modern as things stand. Only 400 years old. And you should see who created it!! What a motley crew.

So what is the etymology of the word ‘marriage’? What’s more – what is the history of marriage itself?

Dear wiki:

The modern English word “marriage” derives from Middle English mariage, which first appears in 1250–1300 C.E. This in turn is derived from Old French marier (to marry) and ultimately Latin marītāre meaning to provide with a husband or wife and marītāri meaning to get married.

Long before that – it was just an agreement between two people. The female was not always consulted since she was seen as property to be traded. She had no rights until very recently. Marriages were arranged or forced. Some still are. These clerics need to get with the real world and stop being religiously myopic.

This again from wiki:

 Various types of same-sex marriages have existed,^[40] ranging from informal, unsanctioned relationships to highly ritualized unions.^[41]

While it is a relatively new practice to frequently grant same-sex couples the same form of legal marital recognition as commonly granted to mixed-sex couples, there is a long history of recorded same-sex unions around the world.^[42] It is believed that same-sex unions were celebrated in Ancient Greece and Rome,^[42] some regions of China, such as Fujian, and at certain times in ancient European history.^[43] A law in the Theodosian Code (C. Th. 9.7.3) issued in 342 CE imposed severe penalties or death on same-sex marriage in ancient Rome^[44] but the exact intent of the law and its relation to social practice is unclear, as only a few examples of same-sex marriage in that culture exist.^[45]

Terry and Mark and their wedding and good on them.

And then what about polygamy and polyandry? What about all different religious faiths’ requirement or lack thereof?

The Catholics and Protestants on this island are so hidebound by tradition they seem to think nothing happened until their arrival. What a jolt of realism for them to have to adapt to, but adapt they will. Eventually and dragged kicking and screaming to the altar of modern realism. It will be secular.

Climate Change, George Pell and denial

I have to keep writing about the intense irritation I feel whenever I hear of, watch or listen to people spruiking on subjects about which they have no knowledge.

I am a lay person and know my limitations. I am not a climate scientist and I have no option but to listen to those who are climate scientists and who are qualified in other scientific disciplines. After all, climate science is a cross disciplinary subject requiring input from many different areas.

I am also aware that science is never settled; that scientists are always devising further research experimentation in an attempt to disprove a hypothesis and even theories. Take Feynman for example. He always started from first principles because he wanted to understand as much as possible about already evidenced theories.

Pell, ArchBish of Sydney

So it galls me greatly when the Archbishop of Sydney is given a dais from which to make his uneducated statements about climate change and how it isn’t happening. Or, put another way, how it has always happened and today is no different from other global periods of climate change. In other words, nothing to do with us and how we live on this planet while consuming about 1.4 planets in the process.

Pell is called a conservative intellectual by a generous Andrew Welder in today’s Crikey environmental blog Rooted. I first realised that Pell was in London on Friday when another Rooted correspondent wrote of Pell’s dreadful address at Westminster’s Cathedral Hall.

He (Pell) was invited by a dodgy group called The Global Warming Policy Foundation. It was founded in 2009 by Nigella Lawson’s father, an arch conservative. The Board of Trustees has dodgy names on it and the Academic Advisory Council to the Foundation has more dodgy names but does also have Matt Ridley, so there may be some hope. Otherwise it smells of big money and climate change denial.

So they invited George Pell to deliver a lecture he called One Christian Perspective on Climate Change. Here is the ruddy lecture! He plays the Christian apologist all the way through while cherry picking whatever suits his ‘Christian’ view. I agree with Welder that Pell hates the grass roots ‘Greens’ and even more so, the political Greens. You can hear Pell virtually spitting in the transcript whenever he mentions them. It is because as Welder says:

 The Greens are Australian politics’ most active supporters of policies that go against what Pell regards as core Catholic teachings on how people should conduct their lives: abortion, euthanasia, sex education, homosexuality. If the Greens are “wrong” about those issues, the reasoning goes, then they must also be “wrong” about the climate.

I suppose I could apologise for the vitriol with which I write this post but I am disinclined to having read the insulting language Pell employs in his lecture towards anyone who accepts climate change as happening as a result of our poor husbandry of our planet.

A commenter on the Rooted blog notes that:

“He (Pell) isn’t an idiot (he has a Phd (sic) from Oxford in Church History and a Masters in Education from Monash) and he is an influential man and a (sic) extremely good communicator. Don’t be blinded by his position in the catholic church (as most of the atheists do (more sic!))”.

I fail to see how a PhD in Church History or a Masters in Education qualifies someone to comment cogently on anything let alone climate change. Pell believes in fairy tales. To my mind anyone who dispenses with logic and rationality in favour of obvious superstitious nonsense is inviting ridicule. Otherwise he wouldn’t believe in ridiculous things.

The main points of tosh that Pell cherry picks and proudly vomits in his lecture include:

• That it is only ‘fashionable opinion’ to attest to the fundamental theory of climate change as being scientifically settled. He fails to realise that opinion is worthless in scientific endeavour.
• That the consensual view among qualified scientists is a ‘category error’.
• That sceptics, like Ian Plimer, bring new data and substantial intellect to the subject.
• He conflates global warming with climate change in order to disparage both global warming and climate change.
• That CO₂ is ‘not a pollutant, but part of the stuff of life’.
• That concentrations of CO₂ could rise almost 13 times today’s concentration before humans and animals would notice it and that plants would love it.
• Pell quotes known and discredited climate change deniers with aplomb while picking on every little problem faced by the IPCC and its panel of working scientists.

The other problem for Pell (apart from his intellectual dishonesty) is that he is a Christian and therefore cannot move past a geocentric view that his god will manage affairs on his planet the way he (god, not Pell!) wants, thank you very much.

Pell suffers dreadfully from that terrible affliction, mental myopia caused by religious belief. Like the Bishop of Carlisle in 2007 who blamed the floods in Yorkshire on society’s moral degradation. This is from the Wiki article on Carlisle:

Dow stated that he believed the resulting flooding (in which several people were killed) was the result of God’s “strong and definite judgment” on the “moral degradation” of British society. In particular, he blamed the economic exploitation of poorer nations and the United Kingdom’s introduction of laws aimed at reducing discrimination against gay people.^[7] He stated that “the Sexual Orientation Regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment.” 

In the introduction to his lecture Pell covers ‘god’s flood and Noah’ and ‘god’s destruction of the linguistic unity of Babel’. There is almost a not so veiled threat that if science tries to answer the big questions and attempts to exert control (Pell would call it interfere in) over the living environment then Pell’s god will wreak his (its) vengeance!

Pell concludes ‘the appeal must be to the evidence, not to any consensus, whatever the levels of confusion or self-interested coercion.’ What!!!

I barely managed to read beyond that statement. Pell is so far behind the times that he is unaware that by far the vast majority of real scientists now accept the anthropic contribution to our current climate change woes.

Together with the Mad Monk, Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition in Australia who has sworn to reverse any carbon tax legislation should the Libs come to power, Pell represents the worst of public figures. I have no idea who mentors whom between the Monk and the Bishop but as I commented on facebook, they detract from Australia’s image abroad and appear to escalate each other’s synaptic death throes.

Soon may it happen so they can enter the asylum, removed from the public sphere.

Frightening and dangerous.

Condoms and the Pope

They really like me!!

So now we have the Pope backpedalling over his comments in the Cameroons last year about condoms actually making HIV infection worse. The outrage his comments caused should have made him closet himself away in his ivory tower for the rest of his pathetic life.

But he didn’t; he has been tripping around the world on taxpayers’ money (except Belgium) behaving as if he has the ear of his god. Mind you, if he thinks he has, the men in white (not crimson) coats should be brought in!

Now he has admitted that condom use might be ‘justified in exceptional circumstances’. He means, of course, in circumstances involving male prostitutes. Well, of course!! Then condoms aren’t used for contraceptive reasons, are they!!

What I would like to know is whether any or how many of his priests wore condoms while sexually assaulting the little kiddies they so deny having done.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the most disgustingly hypocritical and evil organisations that humans beings have spawned in their tenure on this planet.

I am pleased that the good people of Italy while all being nominally baptised as Catholics (to keep the RCC numbers claimed by the Vatican inflated thus increasing the state donations to the Vatican) are not contributing to the exponential growth in global population any more than any other western country. Nor is there any greater incidence in the reported number of HIV/Aids sufferers in Italy. Condoms continue to sold by the billions and less and less people take notice of the Pope.

I presume that those good people heed the words of the  Pope’s edicts on contraception as I would. Turn a blind eye and use ear plugs.

16th Century cartoon of two-faced RCC

The ‘analysts’ and others are hailing the Pope’s words as indicating his ability to learn about the reality of the world as it is not the way he would like it to be. Or rather, the way he interprets his god’s thoughts.

I, on the other hand, think that his pronouncements are political in nature and who would trust a politician, especially when he dresses in a frock? And isn’t even a transgender?