Damn Church!

Ok, I'm getting mighty ticked off at the Catholic Church. Catholics? Fine, no problem, I've got lots of friends and family who are religious Catholics, and their Catholicism brings meaning to their lives, makes them good people who I admire, causes them to do good things for society. I went to a Jesuit university and loved the intellectual and moral climate there. Hurrah for Catholics!

But the Catholic Church? It's a big, lumbering, corrupt, top-heavy, patriarchal bureaucracy guided by medieval social values. It ought to have its land and buildings confiscated like they did in France in 1789.

Source of my ire today: this article saying that the Church has told DC officials that if they allow same-sex marriage, the Church will stop providing social services to the poor. The law does not require the Church to actually officiate same-sex marriages, but does require them to pay benefits to same-sex spouses of employees. Seems that the act of writing a check to cover Bob's health insurance because Gary is a Church employee is such a profound violation of the Church's religious principles that the Church would rather abandon Christ's commandment to serve the poor and downtrodden than compromise those principles. That is one twisted ranking of priorities.

Lingering source of contempt: the Church's insistence that Congress adopt something like the Stupak Amendment as the price for supporting health reform. Rachel Maddow said something last night that I hadn't thought of before. Before Stupak, the compromise that had been struck to avoid having federal money used for abortion services was that the federal subsidies for health insurance and the individuals' contributions would be segregated, and payments for abortion services would be paid out of the individuals' contributions. The Church called that a shell game - money is fungible, after all. Of course the Church is right. Here's another example of a shell game. The Church receives billions of tax dollars to support its social services work. But tax dollars should not be used to support purely religious activities like evangelism, paying priests, and so on. So the tax dollars are put in a separate pot to be used only for the authorized purposes, and the rest of the Church's activities are funded from its own sources. I assume that the Church, in fairness, would approve of a law modeled on Stupak that would prohibit any organization receiving federal money from participating in religious activities? Any takers?