Actually, it’s one I read in the Star-Ledger today.  Fellow who wanted to be a priest but was turned down because he was illegitimate, and was dismayed by the exclusion of gays from the priesthood – neither he nor they chose how they were born.  I really don’t know why people even want to be part of an organization that so clearly doesn’t want them.  They should start their own religion that accepts people of faith, and let the Catholic church keep all the pedophiles.  I think this is the thing that really steams me – the scandal, the lawsuits, and the problems are not being caused by gay men, but by pedophiles.  By making this big thing about not admitting gays, it further reinforces the idea that pedophilia and homosexuality are somehow one and the same.  Look, folks, pedophiles like children.  Some like boy children, some like girl children, some like both.  Homosexuals like adult relationships with persons of the same sex – their age differences are probably not going to be any more shocking than the age differences between members of heterosexual couples.  Maybe even less, since an older woman or man with a partner of the same sex, but photogenic and hot isn’t going to get the same social approval as, say, Donald Trump and the wife of the week.  The perpetuation of this myth of homosexuality being equivalent to pedophilia irritates me, but I also wonder why people still want so badly to be part of this organization that insists they are unworthy as human beings.  (I wonder this about women, too, sometimes, but they tend to be more likely to grow up doing as they’re told, so I suppose it makes a wee bit more sense.) 

I wonder, too, about why we give so much power to the idea that a religion can overcome a problem without any other factor coming into play.  We just got a Christmas card from a jailed pedophile of our unfortunate acquaintance, one in a series over the years of his incarceration, which began with capitalized exultations to the Lord and was punctuated with many, many exclamation points.  Too many perpetrators of criminal acts “find God”, and that seems to be acceptable to some people as evidence of genuine reform.  Not to me.  It’s way too easy – it’s like a deathbed confession, or an extension of the “I’m sorry this happened” speech at sentencing.  It abdicates responsibility.  It’s faith with an ulterior motive.  In fact, I think that one of the reasons we keep receiving these unwanted greetings at the holidays is for written proof to be shown to the parole board next month.  “See?  I even found God two years before this!  And I keep finding him!  Nope, God sure can’t hide from me!!”  Someone else out there is dubious about the jailhouse conversions.  And this, to me, is yet another piece of evidence of the failure of the Catholic church.  The priest says “Go forth, and sin no more” but the understanding is that you can just keep sinning and sinning and sinning as long as you say you’re sorry later.  That just doesn’t cut it in the real world.  And clearly, if you can keep sinning after being told not to, then religion isn’t going to be an effective tool for self-improvement.  And yet. . .it carries so much weight with people.

Ban homosexuals, but protect pedophiles.  Allow people to commit the same wrongs over and over again, but insist that morality would persevere if public schools taught from the bible and had morning prayers.  I could go on, but I won’t – right now these are the two things in particular that seem so obvious to me that the general public’s ignorance of them is making my head hurt.