Anne Rice: Today I quit being a Christian

For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

Those are the words of the writer Anne Rice. She has left the Catholic Church. Her reason is because she could not stand by and just watch as the bishops spent parishioners' hard-earned money to defeat the civil rights of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men in secular society.

... When that broke in the news, I felt an intense pressure. And I am a person who grew up with the saying that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, and I believe that statement.

Evil? Too strong a word? No. It is evil. It is the evil of George Wallace ... the evil of Adolph Hitler. If they had their way, we would be burning like witches.

Want to read the story? Go here.

Bishops, beware ... drop drop drop drop that becomes a tidal wave.

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Vatican Leaders and Mel Gibson

Maybe the Vatican leaders should hire Mel Gibson as their spokesman?

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Vatican Leaders: Women Priests and Pedophiles, Part 2

Of course, my evil twin (or maybe my more honest self) says: "Let those asshole Vatican leaders run the church into the ground. Good riddance to bad rubbish." The leaders of the church have done so many horrific things over the centuries. The pope is a dictator -- who wants to pledge alligiance to that?

Read The Vatican Empire by Nino Lo Bello ... still relevant even though it was written in the late 60's -- the author talks about the enormous wealth of the Catholic Church. (And they have the nerve to beg money on the pulpit on Sundays. Actually, my family's parish priest used to yell from the pulpit about all the slackers who weren't putting in their donation envelopes ... or were putting in too little.)

[Thanks Labrys for the little push.]

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Vatican Leaders: Women Priests and Pedophiles

(c) 2008 K. Smokey Cormier

It's time now. Don't you think?

It's really time for Catholic women to take back their church. Those bishops and cardinals ... ya gotta wonder. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

The New York Times reports that Vatican leaders have essentially equated ordaining women as priests as grave an infraction as priests molesting children. Here's an excerpt:

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

The overall document codified existing procedures that allow the Vatican to try priests accused of child sexual abuse using faster juridical procedures rather than full ecclesiastical trials. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the changes showed the church’s commitment to tackling child sexual abuse with “rigor and transparency.”

Those measures fell short of the hopes of many advocates for victims of priestly abuse, who dismissed them as “tweaking” rather than a bold overhaul. The new rules do not, for example, hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch, nor do they require them to report sexual abuse to civil authorities — though less formal “guidelines” issued earlier this year encourage reporting if local law compels it.

But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to ordain women in a list of the “more grave delicts,” or offenses, which included pedophilia, as well as heresy, apostasy and schism. The issue, some critics said, was less the ordination of women, which is not discussed seriously inside the church hierarchy, but the Vatican’s suggestion that pedophilia is a comparable sin in a document billed a response to the sexual abuse crisis, which roared back from remission in Europe this spring a decade after it first erupted in the United States.

“It is very irritating that they put the increased severity in punishment for abuse and women’s ordination at the same level,” said Christian Weisner, the spokesman for “We Are Church,” a liberal Catholic reform movement founded in 1996 in response to a high-profile sexual abuse case in Austria. “It tells us that the church still understands itself as an environment dominated by men.”

[To read the whole article, go here.]

I guess those Vatican leaders want to run the church right into the ground.

Once more, I say to Catholic women: It's time to take back your church!

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Catholic Church: Time For Women To Take Over!

(c) 2008 K Smokey Cormier

Yes, it's time:

• For decades church leaders kept horrific tales of abuse out of the public eye through an elaborate culture of secrecy, deception, and intimidation. Victims who came forward with abuse claims were ignored or paid off, while accused priests were quietly transferred from parish to parish or sent for brief periods of psychological counseling.
• Catholic Church Inundated with Sexual Abuse Allegations
• As the Vatican announced Friday that Pope Benedict XVI has signed a pastoral letter about Ireland's abusive priests, it became increasingly clear that the church abuse crisis has entered a new international phase, with allegations spreading across a half dozen countries -- including the pope's native Germany.The Norwegian Catholic Church said Friday it was aware of four more potential sexual abuse cases by priests against minors, two days after it revealed that a bishop who resigned last year did so after abusing an altar boy.
• Alleged misconduct by Catholic priests continues to surface and the church is struggling to contain the damage. VOA's Mariana Schroeder looks at how these allegations are haunting the church in Germany, the pope's homeland.
• "Now we have obvious confirmation that this is a global crisis," said John Allen, CNN's Vatican analyst and senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. "Anywhere there is a substantial Catholic population there is the potential for this type of scandal."
• Sexual abuse of children by priests has been brought to light in a number of countries, but the recent apologies from the Vatican are “too little too late”. At least, that is the opinion of Yvo van Kuijck, former chairman of the independent Assessment and Advisory Committee (Beoordelings- en Adviescommissie, BAC) which cooperates with Hulp & Recht, the Netherlands’ hotline for reporting sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Since it was set up in 1995, the hotline has received almost 300 reports of sexual abuse. “It has taken too long for the Church to apologise and take action. (…) The Dutch bishops adopted the same ‘wait and see’ approach. I didn’t get the impression that dealing with sexual abuse was a priority for them." Two years ago, dissatisfied with the attitude taken by the Dutch bishops, Yvo van Kuijck, now vice-president of the District Court in Arnhem, resigned along with the entire Assessment and Advisory Committee. Priests guilty of abuse in one parish were simply transferred to another parish where they were free to find new victims. "Not only is that unprofessional, it’s inconceivable."
• Trailblazing work done by Canadian investigators into Church sex abuse goes all but unnoticed by Catholic Church worldwide.
• A priest who admitted indecently assaulting deaf boys at a school in Yorkshire has been allowed to remain as a cleric, it can be revealed, as the scandal over abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church moves to Britain.
• As clergy sex abuse scandals in Europe made headlines worldwide, bishops in Latin America expressed support for Pope Benedict XVI. But observers say it is just a matter of time before the upheaval that has struck the United States and Europe hits Latin America. A few cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy already have surfaced. The most notorious is that of Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ in Mexico, who died in 2008. Other cases have emerged in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, but there have been no widespread accusations.
• New Zealand's Catholic church is investigating five historical cases of alleged sexual abuse, and victims' counsellors say the situation here is no better than scandal-plagued dioceses overseas. It has been eight years since New Zealand's Catholic church apologised to its parishioners about how it had historically handled sexual abuse cases, after admitting to 38 cases of sexual abuse by priests and other men in its ranks.
• About 4 percent of Catholic priests have been accused of sexually abusing minors over the past half-century, according to a draft of the first comprehensive study of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in the United States. The percentage is higher than many people, including church officials, had anticipated.
• Predator Priests: Boston's worst abusers preyed on dozens of children.

and recently, from my beloved city of Oakland:

• Lewis Van Blois, an Oakland attorney who represented six child abuse victims of Bay Area priests, said Saturday that the letter [a letter surfaced that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent to the Oakland Diocese in 1985, saying he needed more time to consider a request from then-Oakland Bishop John Cummins to defrock Stephen Kiesle, who had already pleaded no contest to lewd conduct charges for tying up and molesting two boys at a parish in Union City, where he was a teacher and priest.] wasn't surprising. "We knew that the church hierarchy, from the bishops up to the cardinals all the way to the Vatican, were part of a pattern of cover-up to protect the priest and the church at the expense of the victims," he said. "Not much was being done to get rid of these abusing priests."

[from various news sources online]



Of course, I also believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely ... so something else would also have to change in the governing of the Catholic Church ... like, maybe the practice of true DEMOCRACY.

------- Update -----

• See Maureen Dowd's recent post at the NYTime's site here. (Although I do NOT like her snarky comment about men in dresses.)
  
• Also, women religious in the Catholic Church are doing some resistance of their own. Many are not complying with a new Vatican study that they feel is intrusive, see here.

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Health: Subjects Guaranteed To Make Me Unpopular

Overpopulation, Abortion, and Fertility Treatments are the triune deity of today's topic, I'm afraid. Just raise any one or more of these three as a topic of conversation in your venue of choice and prepare to be pelted with, let's call them ungracefully aging fruit and vegetable matter, if not invective and threats against life and limb.

What the fuck, why not live dangerously? I need the excitement. (You try sitting in an eyrie-like bedroom for a year with the very rare trip down the stairs to visit with friends or, worse yet, doctors and lawyers.)

So here goes. Today's topic happily combines all three abuse-inviters, and if you're going to comment, just remember, this here is my territory and while I am absolutely committed to freedom of speech, I have no problem retaliating in kind when someone, anyone, attempts to kick my behind in a hostile fashion. Respectful disagreement is, OTOH, always welcome.

Alright, alright, I'm cuttin' to the chase already, geeze. Nadya Suleman. Who, you ask? Surely everybody from Monterey to Mauritania has heard of Ms. Nadya Suleman, who recently delivered eight babies in California? The media lickspittles, terrified of incurring the venom of the rightwingnut insane elements, keep referring to the sproggen as healthy. Well, according to my research, they were born 9 weeks premature, and anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, anatomy, human health, or medicine knows quite well that the earlier before term a fetus is expelled or delivered, the worse its chances at life. We now have technology that will keep a 1.x-lb preemie alive, but nature did not intend such creatures to live, so what we end up with is a disabled human at some point along the way. Severity of disability depending on various factors, but usually proportionate to the unripeness of said oven-bun. Incidentally, some of Nadya's octuplets weighed less than 2 lb at birth.


In case you're one of the seven people on the planet who hasn't heard of Nadya Suleman, here is all the information you'll ever need.

Nadya Suleman is 33 years old. She lives with her parents, Edward and Angela Suleman, in the community of Whittier, a bumpule in the megacarcinoma of Los Angeles. It would appear from the facts available via teh Googles that Ms. Suleman (and, of course, her parents) is an Iraqi Christian. Her father, Edward, who is in his sixties, is a former Iraqi army dude. He continues to work with the U.S. Army as a translator in Iraq. Her mother Angela is a retired schoolteacher. Reasonably intelligent, well-educated people, wouldn't you say? And clearly very fond (deity alone knows why) and supportive of their daughter.

Nadya is an only child, and apparently always wanted siblings, which her mother declined to provide. Apparently, this caused Nadya to attempt to break world records in procreation. Nadya's name was originally Nadya Doud, which is why it wasn't easy to discover the facts about her immediately. Sometime in the late 90s, she married one Marcos Gutierrez. She left him four years later and returned to the parental home. There were no children born of the marriage. Around that time, she legally changed her name to Nadya Suleman. She divorced Gutierrez last year.

She has a degree in child and adolescent development which, I suppose, is a good thing. Pity she didn't get a degree in something like the effects of overpopulation, or basic biology (you know, a human body takes around two years to recover from each pregnancy, and all that). She started a master's degree in counselling, but dropped out early last year — presumably to start work on her current litter.

Apparently, shortly after that, Nadya's mother, Angela, filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy involving a house that she had bought as an investment. Debts involved in that action totalled a little over a million dollars. However, Mrs. Suleman and her daughter Nadya still own several properties in California.

At some time or another, Nadya was employed at a fertility clinic. There is a rumour that she was injured on the job, and received a settlement that enabled her to afford the (expensive~!) treatment that makes her the mother of a potential sports team.

Now here's where things get very squirrely (no offense intended to squirrels, who can't help being crazy little rodents with megaquantities of teh cute). Nadya has six previous children, all under the age of 7 years. (7, 6, 5, 3, and 2-y.o. twins.) The oldest four were conceived with the assistance, apparently, of a sperm donor named David Solomon.


Nadya's mother, Angela Suleman, claims that all the children were fathered by the same sperm donor. (Who in the universe would be so batshit-crazy as to donate 14 times to the same loony tune? Or if he donated only once, did she just get all 14 started at the same time and stick them in the deep freeze for thawing whenever she felt like having a baybee? Is this woman the poster child for Seriously Wrong Wrongitude?)

Ed and Angela Suleman are divorced, but continue to live together, no doubt in the interest of providing the auxiliary child care that this dingbat needs. (No, I'm not sorry to be so judgmental. A little judgment, applied early and often, would have ensured that cases such as this don't happen. They shouldn't happen.)

Incidentally, Solomon and Suleman are (obviously) the same name. So who is this David Solomon dude? Why isn't he stepping up to the cameras for HIS 15 minutes of fame? How come Ms. Suleman chose not to have Mr. Gutierrez' babies? Or did Mr. Gutierrez precipitously flee when he realized her potential as a baby manufactory?

After all, her father has fled to Iraq, preferring the comfort of a war zone and some chance of death or dismemberment to the joys of hanging around with 14 screaming children. Her mother is threatening to leave the family home before Nadya returns, thereby saddling the imprudent one with all fourteen bundles of joy or, more likely, effluvia (good luck with that, girlie).


Now, the fact is that reproductive endocrinologists, which is what we call folks who, for a living, help the infertile to reproduce, have to adhere to certain standards, in this country, in order to continue practising their brand of medicine. I know lots of people have their knickers in a knot and want to personally hang the IVF folks who made Nadya Suleman's plethora of pregnancies possible, but folks, really. There's more here than meets the eye.

KevinMD says, at his fine blog, while admitting that the subject is outside his own field, nevertheless raises some interesting questions and provides us with links that might help explain exactly how this woman ended up with her own football team of sprog.

Mind you, what has occurred is statistically very rare indeed. A woman carried to term eight fetii, which have ALL survived. AFAICT, this is only the second recorded case in the US.

Over at Fertility File, a reproductive endocrinologist and med school professor with a passion for math and statistical analysis is happy to give you the likelihood of success of Nadya's pregnancy. Dr. Lee combines wit and wisdom with humanity, and provides a good take on this woman's drama.

So how exactly did Nadya Suleman end up with 14 IVF babies? You don't have to be a genius to realize that there is something very wrong with a woman who keeps having children without any visible means of support, economic or practical. Does she really think her mother will be alive for the next 33 years or so to assist with childcare and support?


She already has one autistic child (it's not clear which of the previous six it is, but it's most likely to be a child over 3 years of age, as the diagnostic tools are unable to accurately spot autism in children below that age). Autistic children are a handful. Depending on the severity of the child's autism, it might never be able to live an independent life, and will always need some level of care and assistance.

Moreover, the more premature a child, the greater its chances of autism, according to a recent study. From the article:

Pre-term birth is associated with a long list of health risks for a baby such as mental retardation, cerebral palsy, lung problems and vision and hearing loss.

Who is going to pay for the medical care that these children will require?

In addition, safe delivery of the children required 46 staff at the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower hospital. That has to cost a bundle. Who is going to pay the cost of delivery and hospitalization of the mother and children? The mother certainly does not seem in a position to pay.

She showed up at Kaiser three months pregnant, at which time she was advised that she could selectively reduce some of her fetii in order to give the others a better chance. She refused selective reduction, doubtless because of her Christian beliefs, which, apparently, don't extend to being able to feed what you breed.

So the rest of us are now stuck with eight kids who will have impairments at various levels that we taxpayers need to support (for those of you already fuming, consider that each healthy child costs about $1 million to raise, not including those full-potential-tapping pluses like music and dance lessons, or top-notch educational opportunities) over the next 18 years.

Consider the autistic sibling. Consider the mother's employment qualifications and status. Consider that she's going to be way too busy taking care of the kids to even look for work for at least 6 years, when the last of the sprog toddle off to pre-school. Consider that her parents, who appear to be saddled with the financial support of the brood, are in their sixties and might not live out another decade without increasingly expensive health problems or that old nemesis of us all, death.

Whatever happens, don't blame the staff of Kaiser Permanente, who actually managed to save this woman's life (instead, pray that they tied her tubes while she was unconscious so she can never do this again). They had nothing to do with getting her pregnant.

The most interesting aspect of this littering is the reaction to it. You'd think all those god-'n-gun conservatives who want all uterii regulated to ensure maximum fruitfulness would be falling over themselves to aid this woman, no?

No. Take a look around the InnerTubes if you dare, but there's some mighty venomous invective being hurled her way. A lot of it has to do with the fact that she's not white. Some are accusing her of personally trying to undo the Holocaust, and have to be gently reminded that she's not Jewish (you'd think Angela and Ed being her parents' names would've been a huge fucking clue). Some insist she's a Palestinian despite the stunning lack of evidence therefor.

Some want her summarily deported; others want her children forcefully removed; still others are campaigning to boycott any kinderjunk producer who donates to her cause. Why the hatred? After all, Kenny and Bobby McCaughey, proud IVF parents of a litter of seven, despite having produced a previous sprog, got themselves a house, an endless supply of diapers, baby formula, junk food, and god-knows-what-all.

From all accounts the woman appears to be a good mother to her kids, but that's only with the help of a nanny and her mother. Also, she's about to find out that 14 kids is a lot more work than six. And, of course, all of us who are watching our earth dying from too many damned people are eyeing her with a level of cynicism that make me nervous. If everybody had 14 kids, we really would have to stage mass suicide campaigns because we would otherwise starve to death in short order.

What do you think?

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The Vatican Empire and Prop 8

President George W. Bush meets with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican June 9, 2007. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (VATICAN)

I feel that people are focusing too much attention and anger towards the Mormons. We must remember the power of the Catholic Church. And we must remember that it was the current Archbishop of San Francisco, George Niederauer, former Catholic bishop of Salt Lake City, who rallied the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to join forces and campaign in favor of Prop 8. He started the ball rolling.

The Catholic Church is powerful and wealthy. The Church is very secretive about its wealth. Why? Well, would you keep filling your parish's envelopes if you knew how wealthy the Church was?

(The Catholic people are a different story. Many Catholics are working class and poor. I think of the Catholic people and the Catholic Church/Government as different entities. I was one of those Catholics at one time. Very devoted to Jesus' philosophy of love thy neighbor -- that's where I learned how to be a progressive, a liberal, a radical y'all!)

In the bowels of the Vatican are art treasures worth ... well, it's hard to evaluate ... there's so much of it and so much of it is worth millions. And that's just the art ... that's not counting the real estate they own all over the world -- and I'm NOT talking about the property that churches, rectories, convents, and schools are built on. No. I mean hard cash type real estate. A bulging stock portfolio. (Although not worth as much as it used to be worth.) Companies that they own. Huge deposits in foreign banks.

If you can, get a hold of a book called The Vatican Empire by Nino Lo Bello, a former Rome correspondent for Business Week.

Focus some of your disagreement towards the Catholic Church ... share the wealth ... don't hog all that energy for only the Mormons. Start boycotting things related to the Catholic Church.

Does the Church really need your money?

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