So Sayeth The Pope

His words are elliptical, but his meaning isn't. Pope Benedict XVI was in Spain this past week, and as expected has made still more pronouncements upon how families should be.

If there was ever an irony in the world, it is people taking the word of a man who has isolated himself from the world for decades of his life to guide them in how they conduct their family lives.

Consider this:

"This is the best way to counter a widespread hedonism which reduces human relations to banality and empties them of their authentic value and beauty," he said, to waves of applause.

Ah, I see - so a young, heterosexual couple making like rabbits is "cute" and "fulfilling god's will", but a gay couple is "hedonistic". Does anyone else here see a double standard? Oh - waitasec, of course it's not a double standard - the Pope, along with a lot of other people assume that GLB relationships are all focused entirely on sex, and a heterosexual relationship is built on something else.

Or this:

Dressed in green and white vestments, Pope Benedict praised the traditional family, founded on "indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman".

This is a double swipe - the first goes after anyone who lives in a non-traditional family (e.g. Mom, Dad and 2.8 children) - whether that is by adoption, single parents or both parents are same gender. The second swipe is at Spain's recently liberalized divorce laws. Of course, Roman Catholic dogma has always denied divorce - except with the "correct" dispensation from the Vatican...

I find it amazing that the church organization that spent decades concealing child molestation among its clergy, and still believes that the offenders should be "turned over to church authorities" rather than local law enforcement, can spout off about the "hedonism" of others.

Contrary to what the Pope believes, "no fault" divorce laws are a good thing. They bring about a degree of honesty to a process that happens all the time - whether or not the R/C clergy want to admit it. In Canada, not so long ago, there was quite a little industry running about where "Private Investigators" would take staged pictures of a couple engaged in romantic activity - just so that a divorce could be filed for on grounds of "adultery" - with all of the fallout from the resulting fiction.

As I've said before, and I'll continue to state, the Pope - along with a lot of other people are confusing the religious/spiritual notion of marriage and family, defined by whatever scripture you follow, with the legal notion of marriage which is a legal contract between two people and the state. These aren't the same thing, nor should they be.