"I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states." hat tip to Doug Ireland.Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

The Inquisition begins....The wrongheaded investigation of Catholic seminaries for the presence of homosexuals has begun in St. Louis, MO. The head of the college has voiced the opinion that it is a search for the wrong thing, but he will be ignored, if not silenced. Barbara Dorris, the head of SNAP, (Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests) has also characterized the witch hunt as "comparing apples and oranges", i.e., that there is a basic difference between homosexuality and pedophilia.... But then the Catholic Church has not ever been good at reality.

I'm not particularly offended that church groups are being reimbursed by the federal government for their relief work through the characteristically cockeyed American way of "giving" that translates into "contracts" and, let's face it, big profits, for some corporations. However, these church groups are the same beneficiaries to ultra-discriminatory hiring loopholes that enable them to refuse to hire a gay man like me, but are quite able to suck up my tax dollars. If you take my tax dollars, you are no longer a private organization and should be subject to the civic rules that used to require "non-discriminatory" somewhere in the mix!

Religion has usually been awfully simplistic when it comes to sexuality. Clearly, almost all of us are born either physically male or physically female. However, when we look beneath the skin, all the "male/female" criteria become quite lost. The enormous variety of what makes up maleness or femaleness is a bane to the arbiters of religious mores, and in the face of this vast forest of possibility, they simply try to cut down many of the trees. The more exotic blooms are excised from the forest because they are taxonomically incorrect.