Pope Decides Gay People Aren’t Fully Developed Humans

Pope decides gay people aren't fully developed humans

The Pope’s comments were made during a September 21 speech at Castel Gandolfo, whereby he reportedly told his assembled religious brethren that “The family is threatened in many places by a faulty conception of human nature.” Some translations have him saying the word “defective,” in fact.

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Perhaps most startling of his remarks on gay marriage and secularization was his saying the Church must “promote those values that permit the full development of the human person.”

Another article here.

And it's attitudes like that which lead to the kind of tragedies where authoritarian religious followers take matters into their own hands and do things like kill their own family members over religion and politics.  Not to mention the millions of suicides, murders (Matthew Shepard comes to mind) and kids being kicked out of their own homes and ending up in homeless shelters, in prostituion or dead.

My parish is having a series of debates on the broader issue of sexuality but everybody knows that's a bunch of tap-dancing and the real issue is gay marriage because everything has been pretty much settled.

The main problem is going to be trouncing the homophobes because they've got their talking points all memorized and they sound really good to somebody who doesn't know what they're up to.  Even before this came out (pun intended) my approach was going to be that gay people are fully functioning, not "intrinsically disordered" and hence worthy of all the rites and sacraments of the Church.  My ammunition was going to be logic, this blog and the Bible (of all things).

My tools:

• rules on how to have a discussion
• list of logical fallacies
• printouts of the source documents, the original scriptures (they're in pretty rough shape)
• the "clobber verses" rebuttal
• deconstruction of the Regnerus study

Wish me luck.

Neil Armstrong - RIP

RIP = Requiem in Pacet

Us boomers have fond memories of Neil Armstrong.

Unfortunately, the Phelps clan doesn't.

Goban Van Rompay ‏@GobinetVanRompa

God gave Neil Armstrong 82 years to obey. He ignored God’s law with his proud adultery. It is not going well for him now!

Retweeted by Fred Phelps Jr

 I've googled everywhere and I can't find anything linking Armstrong to adultery.  

As a kid, I was a space nut, as I'm sure most of us were.  I wanted to be an astronaut.  I watched every broadcast, read everything I could on the topic.  I was fascinated with the X-15, which Armstrong flew.  My father was a science teacher.  My sister bought me my first telescope.  I remember us in the back yard watching Sputnik go over.  I was pretty young so it was mostly a lot of telephone calls late at night (my father had some sort of position of minor responsibility with the International Geophysical year), then suddenly everybody's in the back yard pointing up at a dot of light.  After that I paid a lot of attention to the sky as I'm sure many others did.  Some of my friends were into ham radio and spent hours on headsets listening to spacecraft go over, trying to decode the telemetry.  Anybody with a short-wave radio (like me) could also listen in if you could find the right frequency.

Some people think the Apollo landings never happened.  I disagree.  I was there. I grew up studying technology and it's what I do for a living.  The Apollo landings could not have been faked because too many people were watching and it actually would have been easier to go to the moon than fake going to the moon.  It all has to do with radio waves.  They don't travel in straight lines.  They're not like lasers.  They radiate.   That's what makes the whole argument fall apart.  Lots of people watched the launch.  Something got put up into orbit.  Then the ham radio guys started tracking it and listening in on the conversations.  They could only hear one set of voices.  If the "conversation" was being uploaded to something like a satellite to re-broadcast, due to leakage, they'd hear two conversations.  The incoming version on one frequency, then the re-broadcast on another a moment later.  Nobody heard anything.

As the spacecraft left orbit, it was easy enough to track.  Amateur astronomers all over the world could see it in their telescopes. There was a whole network of us out there, communicated by mail and telephone.  My claim to fame is spotting Explorer II after it was supposed to have re-entered. Somebody would have noticed if the spacecraft was in the wrong position (eg. still in orbit).  The radio guys would have noticed if the signal strength was wrong.

After it was all over, something came back from space.  It got tracked in.  People got out with rocks that weren't there when it lifted off.

Posting this unfinished 'cause I need to get another one up.