For all the proud American flags and boisterous bumper stickers, I don’t think the religious right gets it.

Like when they suggest that marrying someone of the same sex is tantamount to marrying a corpse or animal.

Or when they insist that allowing terminally ill patients the option of choosing their own death is the same as government-sponsored genocide of “unworthy” groups.

Or, for that matter, when they suggest that the life of a zygote, embryo, or fetus with no conscious brain activity is equal to that of a sentient woman.

Someone, please tell me - where is the disconnect here? Why does consent mean absolutely nothing to these people? Why is human will and pursuit of happiness absolutely valueless?

How can anyone be so thick as to suggest that marriage is anything less than a deep commitment and a legal union, one that anyone in their right mind would recognize cannot be consented to by lifeless bodies and/or animals? Honestly. It’s a whole new realm of stupid. Even the most dimwitted of the Republican tribe should be able to comprehend that when you take one “I do,” out of a marriage, you don’t have one.

Advocating for the right to choose life and death on our own terms is about as far from advocating murder or genocide as you can get. And hey, even the occasional freeper gets it:

Freeper 1:

You have always had the ability to make that decision - if you really want to head out of here, you can breathe into a plastic bag that’s over your head, swim too far out to be able to return, shoot yourself, OD on any number of drugs.

Freeper 2:

You can do all of those things with a healthy body. The miserably dying who would want to end their pain often can’t do anything but lay in bed crapping themselves and pressing the morphine button harder.

For those who can do it themselves, brains and hair all over the wall and a closed casket funeral aren’t a very kind thing to do to their friends and survivors.

You certainly have a point with the slippery slope from choice to die to obligation to die, but as far as I’m concerned the obligation to suffer is worse.

What breaks my heart most of all is the Catholic stance against Amnesty International’s new policy advocating abortion access for rape victims in regions like Darfur.

One survivor’s testimonial:

“After six days some of the girls were released. But the others, as young as eight years old were kept there. Five to six men would rape us in rounds, one after the other for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this, he disowned me.”

Another woman -

“Women will not tell you easily if they have been raped. In our culture, it is a shame. Women hide this in their hearts so that men don’t hear about it.”

From an Amnesty International press release (emphasis mine):

Women who have become pregnant as a result of rape are most likely to suffer further abuses of their rights. There is the trauma of the rape itself as well as the difficulties associated with carrying and caring with a child who is the result of violence. In the specific social context of Darfur, in a society where rape is considered a taboo and a shame for the survivor of this violence, the child who is a result of rape will mostly be considered as a child of the “enemy”, a “Janjawid child”. Survivors of rape and their children are most likely to be ostracized by their community and married women most likely to be rejected by their husbands. Women may feel forced to abandon the child who is a result of rape and face another traumatic decision to make.

The communities of the women raped do not seem ready to accept the need to provide their full support for these women and possibly the child who could result from such violation. In group and face-to-face interviews conducted by Amnesty International in May 2004, women and men said that while they would accept raped women back into the community, the child as a potential result of rape would not be accepted. This leads women who have become pregnant as a result of rape to a situation of further ostracism, trauma and abuses of their rights. The lack of medical and psychological care facilities to deal with survivors of rape in the refugee camps in Chad and the many more victims in the IDP settlements in Darfur further compounds this situation.

For many men in the refugee camps the human rights violation of rape seems to directly translate into a humiliation against themselves and the group they belong to.

This is addition to the psychological trauma of carrying a “Janjawid child” as the result of being brutally raped. This is in addition to the dangers of childbirth, many of which are exacerbated in abused rape victims.

The Catholic community doesn’t live in some lovely fantasy world where women and children don’t suffer or die from rape and its consequences. They just don’t care. The message is this: when you become pregnant, your most basic needs become irrelevant.

As Mindelle Jacobs wrote in her comment to the Edmonton Sun, “Zygotes matter. Women don’t.”

They just don’t get it.

Classy. A Texas church retracts its offer to hold a memorial service for a Navy veteran after discovering that he was, in fact, gay:

It seems incredible that no one at Arlington’s High Point Church saw the obvious: that Cecil Sinclair, a dying 46-year-old Desert Storm veteran awaiting a heart transplant, was gay.

The church had reached out to Sinclair in his illness because his brother was a janitor and a church congregant. While Sinclair was in the hospital, High Point’s audio-visual minister met Sinclair’s life partner. When Sinclair died, church officials knew the Turtle Creek Chorale, a gay men’s chorus, had been asked to sing at the funeral.

But it was only after Sinclair’s obituary ran that Pastor Gary Simons clumsily canceled a memorial service it had offered for Sinclair — the day before it was to take place.

Simons’ leadership was graceless, but High Point is a private institution and is entitled to reject whom it wants to.

As Sinclair’s partner Paul Wagner, a Desert Storm veteran and a member of the armed forces for 16 years, put it, “I have fought for their right to hate me.”

Appalled?

Later, Simons told the Dallas Morning News that the situation was comparable to a congregation member losing a son who was a thief or murderer. High Point might offer a service, Simons said. “But I don’t think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone.”

You simply cannot honor a person’s memory if you look upon the life they had with their loved ones with the same disgust normal people would attribute to murder.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Virginia Tech massacre victims and their families. I can’t imagine how difficult a time this is to so many people.

Some people just have no hearts (from pandagon):

WBC to Preach at Funerals of Virginia Tech Dead
WBC will preach at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students killed on campus during a shooting rampage April 16, 2007. You describe this as monumental horror, but you know nothing of horror — yet. Your bloody tyrant Bush says he is ‘horrified’ by it all. You know nothing of horror — yet. Your true horror is coming. “They shall also gird themselves with sackloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads” (Eze. 7:18).

Why did this happen, you ask? It’s simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants.

Nope, not kidding:

If sex bonds two people, then sexual pleasure without a partner will still powerfully bond you, but the bonding will be to whatever sights and thoughts are present at the time. For some people, the bonding will be to the sight of their own body. If so, it will be this – and possibly the sight of their own gender – that will begin to dominate their passions.

Likewise, looking at yourself in the mirror the wrong way is bound to turn you homo. If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “damn, I look sexy,” you have already begun the transformation. You have been warned!

It gets better:

Then there are those who try to convince themselves they are being godly by masturbating while focusing on spiritual things. If Jesus walked this planet today, would you try to have sex with him? Sexual bonding is exclusively for a husband and wife. Anything else is a perversion. Sexual bonding must not be used to join a person to a relative or a friend or an animal or an object or to the Holy Lord.

And I thought my mind was in the gutter. I can honestly say that I have never, ever fantasized about taking Jesus to bed. Ever.

Darwin and the FSM faithful are once again facing off with the almighty being in the fight for Kansas schools. I, for one, am rooting for “He who created all that we see and all that we feel” - the Flying Spaghetti Monster, of course.

Last saturday, a 21-year-old woman was raped in Tampa, Florida. She managed to escape and called 911. The police took her to a hospital and began a rape investigation, and the young woman was given the first dose of the “morning-after pill” and a prescription for the remaining pills. She had no way of knowing that she would be hauled off to jail and denied access to the remainder of the medication.

When the police ran a background check on the young woman, they found that there was a warrant out for her arrest.

It was from an arrest when the woman was a juvenile and she was accused of not paying restitution. The woman says she was not aware there was a warrant out for her, and her attorney says it appears to be a paperwork error.

“They were more interested in prosecuting her for something that’s a paperwork snafu from four years ago, that was juvenile. They were more interested in working on that than finding an experienced rapist,” stated the victim’s mother.

Still, the woman was put in handcuffs and taken to jail. She was not allowed bond, and the medical staff at the jail refused to give her the Morning After Pill even though it had been prescribed at the hospital.

“The system as a whole, that is so broken, it needs to be completely fixed, so broken, so broken that something like this could happen, something like this should never have happened,” said the victim’s mother.

The victim did manage to finally bond out of jail Monday afternoon. She was too emotionally distraught to speak with the media.

If this disturbed you as much as it disturbed me, please take action!

A Las Vegas Catholic Priest is facing charges of attempted murder, kidnapping, and battery with the intent to commit sexual assault. 52-year-old George Chaanine allegedly beat a female Church employee. The woman was not sexually assaulted, but police working with the Sex Crimes Unit found that the encounter “had sexual connotations.”

Chaanine was put on “administrative leave.” Another one bites the dust.

As a whole, Catholic Priests are dropping like flies. Pam at Pandagon notes:

BTW, the numbers are staggering, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. In 2005 there were about 42,000 priests nationwide, which is a 29% decline since 1965. Back at that time there were 549 parishes without a resident priest. Today there are 3,200 with a vacancy. That’s a dying church, and Benedict’s hard-headedness will ensure its rapid decline here in the States.

Feministe has a downright frightening post about the girls of puritygirls.com, a fundamentalist Christian website that encourages young women to completely repress their sexuality until marriage - no kisses, no touching, period. Jill quotes multiple forum posts where girls are told to blame themselves when boys lust after them, as they “bear part of the sin” for having dared to look attractive. It’s not difficult to see the harm this indoctrination has had on these kids; one regretful girl tells of the ’scars’ she still has because she ‘messed up.’ Her story:

I agree totally!!!!! God is gonna write my love story!! The thing is, that when you do mess up, it’s hard to forgive yourself! I have never had sex outside of marriage,(Thank goodness!), but when I was younger, 5,6,7, I kissed a guy. Not on the lips, but it still leaves a scar. I knew better than that then too! I didn’t know how it would effect me in the future obviously, and I didn’t totally know all about purity, but I knew not to go around kissing boys! I feel soooo bad now, and it is soo hard sometimes to forgive myself for it! Purity is sooo important, and whether you can see it now or not, even something as small as a kiss can effect you!

STAY STRONG IN PURITY!!!!

Young women also discuss feminism, which is apparently bringing about the family apocalypse. Many of the girls agree that women should not be permitted to teach men, hold any level of leadership (”Exception: If there is no male person available to do the job needed, then a woman could step up to the job needing to be filled, and fill it until a man is available to do the job”), or ‘feminize’ men by having a career that supports the family. Talk about taking a step backwards.

Jill makes a good point: many of these girls are intelligent and thoughtful young women. Hopefully they’ll grow to respect themselves enough to realize that they don’t deserve to be treated as second-class citizens just because they happen to be female.

In Tipton County, Tennessee, sex education has been outsourced to a pro-life, privately-funded Christian counseling center. The name of the new abstinence-only program is “Why kNOw,” which pretty much sums up its intentions to not teach anything about sex but how great it is not to have it. Forget that the vast majority of these kids will have sex at some point in their lives; they don’t need to be taught trivial information like how to protect themselves from STDs or unwanted pregnancy - everyone knows that nothing bad like that ever comes from sex when you’re married, and the 95% of Americans who’ve had premarital sex are just dirty whores who deserve what they get.