today, my last name is "petty", and my first name is "mean-spirited"

[rone]

Poor, poor Karol:

"It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if [the movement to allow gay marriage in Europe] is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man," he writes.

I guess Karol doesn't want a new ideology of evil to impinge on the Catholic Church's old ideology of evil.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's top doctrinal official... said the Pope "was not trying to put the Holocaust and abortion on the same plane" but only warning that evil lurked everywhere, "even in liberal political systems."

GADZOOKS!  NOT LIBERAL POLITICAL SYSTEMS!  Will our children only be safe in a political system that resists change??

Comments

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

Well, no, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution should change, and can be changed, when they need it; the Bill of Rights, after all, was simply the first set of changes to a Constitution that needed changing right from the start.

I did not call the gay marriage issue "instant" or "effortless", and I never would. What I said was, if the system permitted an instant and effortless change to accommodate gay marriage, that same malleability would be a two-edged sword. (Give us gay marriage today, and we might find we have a state-sponsored Christian church tomorrow: the possibility of easy change one way implies the possibility of easy change the other way.) If anything, I sometimes suspect the US is closer to having that defect than the defect of being too hidebound. The same electorate that put Clinton into office, twice, turned around and elected Dubya, twice.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

This still doesn't address the FUD in Ratzinger's "liberal political systems" warning. What exactly did he mean by that?

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

The charitable answer is, he meant, "Evil lurks everywhere, even in political systems, even in the best political systems, namely, liberal ones."

The uncharitable answer is, he meant, "Evil lurks everywhere, even in places some people think are good, but are really cesspits of evil, like liberal political systems."

I would not put money on the charitable answer.