Speaking of oxymorons, let's talk of sex, celibacy, dino porn and the Catholic church ...

It turns out that the Canberra Times is an infinite source of fun, and not just because it gives space to Barnaby "Gina paid for the wedding trip" Joyce ...

Yesterday saw the comedy stylings of Monsigner (sic) John Wood on the subject of gay marriage, in Same-sex marriage is an oxymoron.

What makes the Rev. Msgr.'s musings so piquant or even poignant?

Is it the controversial spelling - and not just once - of a word often written as "Monsignor", especially when the Monsignori are out and about doing their Mafia imitation? Or perhaps if we were feeling a little dandified, Monseigneur?

Did hundreds of indignant Canberrans rush off to the Catholic Encyclopedia to bone up on Monsignor and their splendid history and place in the church? Did the secular ones settle for the Wiki entry on Monsignor?

Nope, it was the tragic sight - yet again - of a man defending a conventional definition of marriage, while at the same time belonging to an institution which regards fucking as only slightly better than burning, and childless marriage to the church as infinitely superior to breeders hitched together in their carnal state of unholy lust - redeemed only if they spawn and send their froglets to the church.

In its troubled youth, the pond was always astonished when someone wearing the frock offered advice on sex, love, marriage and the whole damn thing.

After all, part of the pitch was that they'd removed themselves from contemptible temptations of the flesh for higher duties, as explained in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Celibacy is the renunciation of marriage implicitly or explicitly made, for the more perfect observance of chastity, by all those who receive the Sacrament of Orders in any of the higher grades...
... the candidates for orders are solemnly warned by the bishop at the beginning of the ceremony regarding the gravity of the obligation which they are incurring. He tells them: 
You ought anxiously to consider again and again what sort of a burden this is which you are taking upon you of your own accord. Up to this you are free. You may still, if you choose, turn to the aims and desires of the world (licet vobis pro artitrio ad caecularia vota transire). But if you receive this order (of the subdiaconate) it will no longer be lawful to turn back from your purpose. You will be required to continue in the service of God, and with His assistance to observe chastity and to be bound for ever in the ministrations of the Altar, to serve who is to reign. 
By stepping forward despite this warning, when invited to do so, and by co-operating in the rest of the ordination service, the candidate is understood to bind himself equivalently by a vow of chastity. He is henceforth unable to contract a valid marriage, and any serious transgression in the matter of this vow is not only a grievous sin in itself but incurs the additional guilt of sacrilege. (Celibacy of the clergy)

There you go. Anxiety and guilt ... guilt ... guilt ...

Throw in a few notes by misogynist St Paul about how it's better to marry than to burn, and how it's better to join the church than to marry, and you end up with this meaningless blather about the virtue of virginity:

... in the Church of Christ, as an antithesis to this, the priestly character was imparted by the Holy Ghost in the Divinely-instituted Sacrament of Orders. Virginity is consequently the special prerogative of the Christian priesthood. Virginity and marriage both holy, but in different ways. The conviction that virginity possesses a higher sanctity and clearer spiritual intuitions, seems to be an instinct planted deep in the heart of man.

Delusional. The urge to fuck is deeply planted in men ... and women ... and the urge to celebrate virginity and denial is deeply perverse, and does much to explain why the Catholic church is a refuge for people unable to come to terms with their sexuality and the sexuality of others ...

The pond could go on all day quoting from the encyclopedia's peculiar justification for this weirdness but let's just settle for this one:

...with regard to missionary work in barbarous countries, the advantages which lies with a celibate clergy can hardly need insisting upon and are freely admitted both by indifferent observers and by the non-Catholic missionaries themselves.

Uh huh. Suffer little barbarous children to come unto me, and let me show them a thing or two ... remind us Pete Townsend, as you go about your online research, purely for research purposes:

Your mother left me here to mind you 
Now I'm doing what I want to 
Fiddling about 
Fiddling about 
Fiddle about!

Never mind, the good Rev. Msgr. runs through all the standard responses to gay marriage the Catholic church can muster, including the usual "won't someone think of the children":

For the sake of the child and ultimately for the dignity of all, no one has a right to a child, whatever one’s aspiration for parenthood.

Tell that to Catholic orphanages, busy confiscating children for indoctrination, having handily prevented mothers from obtaining an unsightly abortion in the first place ...

There's also the usual gay bashing:

...it is argued that allowing same sex couples to marry would give them acceptance in the community. On the contrary, it would be recognition at odds with both their orientation (to sameness) and the nature of marriage (unitive and procreative).

It's the procreative riff that really gets to the pond, though the notion that there's something wrong with "sameness", falsely contrasted with "unitive", is also profoundly irritating. If "sameness" prohibits the "unitive" then let's face it, sameness humanity is fucked when it comes to uniting against the dinosaurs and the zombies ...

The proposal that somehow marriages without children aren't genuine is insulting not just to gays but to het couples who have decided against procreation, or are unable for assorted reasons to have children ...

Then there's the usual blather about religious freedom, which is fancy talk for the right of churches to go on excluding and abusing gays for their 'unnatural' 'same' ways (as a way to keep them out of religious schools and out of religious charities sponging on the taxpayer dollar or keep on persecuting students who dare to come out in their schools).

The good Msgr does offer a grudging acknowledgment that marriage might mean different things to different folks:

While there have been marked changes in the understanding of marriage, including the move away from regarding women as mere chattels, or from the use of marriage to confirm family and political alliances or from restrictions on inter-racial marriages, marriage has always been the union of a woman and a man.

Actually marriage has been the union of a woman and many men, and a man and many women, and you don't have to go period Mormon to find many examples.

And if you look into a little social history, the union of a woman with another woman, and a man with another man is as common as homosexuality itself, though in the case of Catholics, this was often by way of de facto marriage, unless you happened to be a serial monogamist, as was the case with Cardinal Newman's serial infatuation with Richard Hurrell Froude and Ambrose St. John ... (you can call them "friendships" if you like).

In fact you can bet if Constantius II felt the need to ban same-sex marriage in 342AD and execute those so married, that there were a few to be executed ...

Of course the banners and the persecutors won most times, so a scrabble through history is more about repression and persecution than it is about success stories (wiki history of same sex unions), but dammit, if it was good enough for Alexander the Great and Hephaestion to be a couple, well that's good enough for the pond (wiki homosexuality in ancient Greece).

But never mind the history. It's simply time for a change, and the abiding hatred and persecution of gays by the Roman Church, the Russian Orthodox church, the evangelicals, fundamentalist Jews, the Islamics, Vlad the preening self-impaler Putin, and assorted other cults and tyrants, simply has to stop ... so when Catholics like the good Msgr blather on about an inclusive god, we can actually respond with talk about an inclusive society ...

Where it  might be considered truly odd and eccentric for folks to celebrate virginity and chastity, but at the same time, acceptance that if that's your kink, you're welcome to it, and whatever pleasure a decent time with a cilice gives you ... just keep it to yourself when you feel the impulse to bang on about gays, or shellfish, or clothes made of mixed threads and all the other rules flung together by goat herders many years ago ...

Meanwhile, all the best to Tony Abbott, his cronies and the good Msgr as they go about the business of sticking fingers in the dyke trying to hold back the inevitable...

Please, no jokes, this is a respectable site, leave the jokes to David Pope, and more Popery here.

Of course Canberra's move is now old news in New Jersey.

Yep, even Joisey has fallen, as celebrated by Colbert yesterday, though his riff was that as a result traditional suburban married values would now saturate the state.

What next? Bestiality?

Usually only in the minds of weird fundamentalists, but relax, Colbert had that covered too, with a juicy slab of dino porn ...

Oh there are more things in the universe than can be imagined by the average Msgr ...