Thursday, July 17, 2008

If God considers gays an abomination, why did he create them? (Contribution)

YOU just can’t shut Stephen Green up, can you?

Nope, not even when his tedious, self-serving drivel gets ever more predictable.

Our Carmarthen-based zealot was at it again this week.

Outraged at the appearance in Britain of Gene Robinson, the American bishop blanked by the CoE because he’s openly gay (as opposed to being secretly gay like dozens of his peers) the Prophet Green of Christian Voice thundered: “It is a sad day when you get a bishop in a church preaching something that God himself called an abomination.”

No God didn’t. Some wild-eyed Bronze Age nomad did. Anyway, that’s by the way.

But it made me wonder. How would this fanatical Hammerer of Homosexuals, leader of a bunch of annoying bigots have interpreted events in Palestine a couple of thousand years ago?

“This Jesus feller swans around all day with a dozen other blokes. No women. Mark that, no women. And he wanders off into the mountains now and again to spend quality time with his, uh, favourites (Mark.9:2). He picks up small boys and girls and puts his hands upon them (Mark 10:16) And he was seen in a garden when one of his mates came up and kissed him (Matthew,26:48). Suspicious, eh?”

Ah yes, bigotry is blind and knows no bounds. But if, as the Prophet Green so frequently claims, God considers gays an “abomination” why did he create them in the first place? To give Green and his kind a platform for their intolerance?

But then again, can anyone make ANY sense out of religion? We are glutted with tales of Muslims massacred by Christians, of Christians crucified by Muslims, of Buddhist and Hindu making war – all in the name of God. But smaller stories speak of the evils perpetrated in his name.

Florina Vranceanu is an 11-year-old Romanian girl.

She was raped by her teenage uncle and the resulting pregnancy was ended at 22 weeks in a London hospital.

Why London? Because abortion in Romania is illegal after 14 weeks, although the Romanian government ruled later that Florina could have the abortion because of “exceptional circumstances.”

But predictably, that country’s pro-life brigade insisted that this child should herself have a child so she was brought to London. Luckily, to a hospital not in thrall to religion. Remember, Britain’s top Catholic, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, barred doctors from performing abortions (or giving contraceptive advice) in a London hospital run by his church.

Thankfully, that church is not as powerful here as in Nicaragua where it forced an end to all forms of abortion, even to save a pregnant woman’s life. Or in Poland, where it fought to eliminate rape or incest as grounds for termination. Florina Vranceanu was the victim of rape and incest. Wonder how the Cardinal feels about her.

For 16 years Eleuna Englaro has been in a coma in an Italian hospital. Her father finally won permission to remove the feeding tube that kept his 37-year-old daughter alive. With startling prescience, Eleuna said before the accident that left her a vegetable: “It’s better to die than remain motionless in hospital at the mercy of others, attached to a tube.”

Naturally, the Vatican disagreed, insisting that “the court decision was euthanasia, and no-one can take it upon themselves to put an end to the life of a person.”

Which brings us to George W Bush, certified born-again buffoon. He was at the forefront in the fight to prevent the removal of a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, a 39-year-old woman left in a coma for 13 years.

The usual suspects joined in – the Catholic church, the rampant religious right, the pro-lifers – none of whom, as far as I know, protested when Bush, as Governor of Texas, “took it on himself” (in Vaticanspeak) to end the lives of dozens on his state’s Death Row.

Hypocrisy. Hysteria. Summed up for me by the tale of the Irish bishop who fathered a child. At least, said his par- ishioners, he was a good Catholic.

He didn’t use a contraceptive.
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