Excommunicate Me

Yesterday was apparently Sir Laurence Olivier’s birthday. TCM presented the late actor with a day of his movies.

Poor  Sir Larry.  He was such a great stage presence. His gifts were usually lost on the screen, as they were in the day’s highlight, The Shoes of the Fisherman.

It’s pretentious Cold War fluff, about moral values in extremis, made bearable only by the enormous gifts of Anthony Quinn as a political prisoner thrust into the Papacy. Quinn, a poor Mexican boy of enormous Earthly appetites, who grew up in East LA, was by far the greatest movie actor of his time, and proves it here.  He masters stillness, the ability to project  a range of emotions without moving a muscle, without a line of dialog.
In the movie Quinn’s Kiril Lakota is forced to make the ultimate choice of Catholic faith, between good works and worldly goods. He chooses good works, forgiving his own humanity and that of everyone else. He doesn’t judge. The ex-slave knows better than to enslave.

Pope Benedict XVI is a long way from that fictional character. A long, long way.

Personally I am sick and tired of being judged to be morally inferior by wealthy men who no more follow Christ’s example in their lives than my mutt imitates Rin Tin Tin. The Catholic Church, in which I grew up, is especially full of such contradictions, between the reality of God’s world and doctrine. It’s all 2+2=5.

And it’s 4, dammit. 2+2 is 4 and the Earth goes around the Sun.

Let me give you an example.

The Prada Pope says anyone who supports choice has excommunicated themselves.

Well, excommunicate me. You see, I’m against slavery.

Forced birth is slavery. Treating the product of sex as equal to a
woman’s life makes  her a mere vessel for men
to use.

That’s not God’s way. If God isn’t bigger than that then God makes no sense. 

Treating every miscarriage as a baby’s death is madness. It’s tragic and sad, but it’s not a baby. God’s not that
cruel, and to imagine God as that way is, to my mind, to consider God to be as small and petty as we are.

There is a reason why brains and hearts develop so late in pregnancy —
it’s because risks are higher earlier and God is merciful. Imagining
God as a murderous rogue who steals babies in the night through
miscarriage is monstrous.

There have been many churches over the years which have gone crazy
like this. The Southern Baptists endorsed slavery, and later Jim Crow.
The Reformed Dutch in South Africa endorsed apartheid. Mormons only allowed blacks in within my lifetime. Back in the day,
Popes tried to prevent the truth about the Sun and the Earth from
coming to light.

I forgive all that.

But I won’t forgive this. And the time has come for men and
women of conviction to stop hiding from this fact. When a woman is
forced, at the point of a gun, to bear a child against her will, she is
a slave to every prick that passes her, from birth to death.

It’s time we stood up for this
simple principle.

It is also time to confront the self-righteous pricks of Hunter Baker, Matt Lewis, Pope Benedict and all the rest who have claimed the moral high ground while seeing half God’s children as unworthy of full humanity.

And I won’t forgive the leader of any all-male clergy who dresses more gay than Carson Kressley,
seeking to enslave half the world to his almighty cock, nor any other
leader of an all-male hierarchy, whether Christian or Jewish or Muslim
or Hindu.

Men and women must be equal. Until they are the Renaissance, frankly, is not over and historians thousands of years from now will still record this period as part of the Middle Ages.

You may feel free to disagree. But when women die at the hands of your self-righteousness, that blood is on your hands.

Until it has a mind that can think and a heart that can survive, unaided, in the light of day, it’s not a human being, and it’s motherhood, a woman’s right to control her own life, that must be honored.

That’s the way nature has made things, and a morality that violates this violates God’s law and God’s will.