Bigotry back in style II

I've always said, if you elect a Bush, you can expect two things, 1.) a war and 2.) a recession. I will have to add 3.) an increase in world bigotry. It's a mystery to me how internal US politics can influence the hate-mongers in other countries - it's probably some kind of gestalt thing. But now we have the Vatican:

Thirty years ago the Catholic Church accepted the view that some were definitively gay. Church teachings said that "they do not choose their homosexual condition." Nevertheless, the new document doesn't just ban gays who "practice" homosexuality, breaking the vows of celibacy. It bans all those with homosexual "tendencies."

In the strange new backsliding language of the Vatican, homosexuality is a "tendency." The church doesn't define tendency, nor does it say whether such a tendency is biological. Voluntary or not, it marks a man permanently. As Matt Foreman, a gay activist who was raised Catholic, says, "Doesn't matter what you do or believe or practice. If you are gay there is no making that better in the eyes of the church."

Ironically, the only exemptions are offered to men who were not "real" homosexuals but "transitory" ones. They're given a pass, in the words of a Vatican cardinal, for "some curiosity during adolescence or accidental circumstances in a state of drunkenness or particular circumstances like someone who was in prison for many years." A drunk or ex-con is okay; a chaste gay seminarian is not.

If we elect Jeb in '08, I think we can get the planet all the way back to the Plague Years. Won't that be fun?