The Beam in Your Own Eye

I love stories about religious figures, especially when they so obviously flaunt their ignorance of the essentials of their own religion.

Take Matthew 7:5

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

This admonition by Jesus isn't holding back a New York Catholic archbishop as Maureen Dowd points out in her NY Times op-ed column:

With his cigars, blogs, Jameson’s and Irish affability, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan prides himself on his gumption.

Certainly his effort to kill the gay marriage bill, just one vote away from passing in Albany, shows a lot of gall.

The archbishop has been ferocious in fighting against marriage between same-sex couples, painting it as a perversity against nature.

If only his church had been as ferocious in fighting against the true perversity against nature: the unending horror of pedophile priests and the children who trusted them.

In the second-generation round of the Church vs. Cuomo, Archbishop Dolan is pitted against Andrew Cuomo, the Catholic governor who is fiercely pushing for New York to become the sixth and most populous state to approve gay marriage.

I guess in the archbishop's ranking of sins 'buggering a child' is less harmful than a 'same-sex marriage'. Go figure! My problem is that in the first case, you are wrecking a kids life, a little kid who doesn't understand what is being done to him by a calculating "man of the cloth". In the latter, you have two consenting adults who want to have a public acknowledgement of their relationship.

I'm amazed that the Catholic church manages to keep its churches full while it persists in its bizarre medieval world view of male-only priests, woman-hating morally simplistic anti-abortion crusades, and their refusal to address the rampant criminal behaviour of its own priests. But what do I know? Obviously I'm not "talking to the big fella upstairs" who seems to approve of this kind of sleazy behaviour. Certainly Jimmy Swaggart was living proof that God loves a boozing, skirt-chasing, sinning hypocrite.

It is hard to believe that the Catholic church has much of a future when:

The church refuses to acknowledge the hypocrisy at its heart: that it became a haven for gay priests even though it declares homosexual sex a sin, and even though it lobbies to stop gays from marrying.

In yet another attempt at rationalization, the nation’s Catholic bishops — a group Dolan is now in charge of — put out a ridiculous five-year-study last month going with the “blame Woodstock” explanation for the sex-abuse scandal. The report suggested that the problem was caused by permissive secular society rather than cloistered church culture, because priests were trained in the turbulent free-love era. It concluded, absurdly, that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were causes.

In another resistance to reform, the bishops voted on Thursday to keep their policies on sexual abuse by the clergy largely the same, with only small revisions, ignoring victims’ advocates who were hoping for meaningful changes.

At their meeting in Bellevue, Wash., one retired archbishop from Anchorage actually proposed an amendment to get rid of the “zero tolerance” provision on abuse so some guilty priests could return to parishes. That failed, at least.

I have no problem with religious communities setting standards within their community for their own members. But I have a real problem when minorities living in a pluralistic society become politically active in order to impose their own twisted logic on the larger community. That's when I start quoting Matthew 7:5.

I love Dowd's humourous twist on things:

Worn out by the rampant sexting of Anthony Weiner and the relentless blogging of Archbishop Dolan, I’m wondering if our institutions need to rejigger: Maybe pols should be celibate and priests should be married.

Human "Rights" in Saudia Arabia

Here are some bits from a good op-ed by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times:

In the ’50s, at the height of the American mania for jokes and TV skits about ditzy women behind the wheel, there was a saying: “Women drivers, no survivors.”

That takes on an ominous new meaning as Saudi women agonize over whether to join in a drive-in Friday — a national protest where women will take the wheel to see if they get thrown in the clink en masse. In 1990, 47 women from the Saudi intelligentsia were so inspired by American troops — and female soldiers — gathering in the kingdom for the first President Bush’s war against Saddam that they went for a joy ride to protest Saudi Arabia being the only country where women can’t drive.

The fundamentalist clerics went into overdrive, branding the women “whores” and “harlots.” They lost their jobs and were harassed. Their passports were revoked and they had to sign papers agreeing not to talk about the drive. When I interviewed some of them 12 years later, they were only beginning to shake off the vengeful backlash.

For all the highfalutin talk of George and Laura Bush about how W.’s wars would help expand the rights of women in the Middle East, there’s only so much pressure America can put on Saudi Arabia about letting women drive without jeopardizing the flow of oil that lets people drive here. President Obama did not even mention Saudi Arabia in his big speech about the Middle East last month.

Driving may not be as important an issue as the end of male guardianship, but it is the high-octane nexus where our hypocrisies interlock.

...

But then a 32-year-old single mother named Manal al-Sharif, an Internet consultant for the state-run oil company Aramco, posted a video of herself on YouTube, driving in a black abaya in the Eastern Province city of Al-Khobar.

She told CNN that the last straw was one night when she was trying to get home to her 5-year-old son and she couldn’t catch a cab or find her brother to pick her up or get away from male drivers harassing her as she walked alone.

“I’m a grown-up woman,” she said, adding: “And I was crying like a kid in the street because I couldn’t find someone to pick me up to take me back home.”

She was put in jail for a week and forced to sign a document agreeing not to talk to the press or continue her calls for reform. This had a chilling effect on women.

But, this week, Reem al-Faisal, a princess, activist and Jidda photographer who is the granddaughter of the late King Faisal and the niece of the Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, spoke out, writing in The Arab News that “it is truly tragic that we have to fight for such an essential yet mediocre right” and be treated as “eternal minors.”

Notice how Barack "Change you can believe in!" Obama is absolutely invisible on this issue. Obama knows how his masters are. He pretends to be a liberal and progressive, but he is a centrist and conservative interested mostly in making sure that the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful.