Vatican's Number Two: Gay Marriage Evil, Abortion "Terrorism With A Human Face"

Tough stuff.

The Vatican's second-highest ranking doctrinal official on Monday forcefully branded homosexual marriage an evil and denounced abortion and euthanasia as forms of "terrorism with a human face."

The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either
Pope Benedict or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.

There's that word "attack" again. Does the left never attack in the eyes of the MSM?

In an address to chaplains, Amato said newspapers and television bulletins often seemed like "a perverse film about evil." He denounced "evils that remain almost invisible" because the media presented them as "expression of human progress."

He listed these as abortion clinics, which he called "slaughterhouses of human beings," euthanasia, and "parliaments of so-called civilized nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex ..."

Amato spoke at a time when the Vatican and Italy's powerful Roman Catholic Church are at loggerheads over plans for a highly controversial law that would give unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples some form of legal recognition.

The Church and Catholic politicians, even some in Prime Minister Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition, see the proposed law as a Trojan Horse and say it could lead to gay marriages.

Amato, who is said to be very close to Pope Benedict, criticized the media's coverage of ethical issues.

After denouncing "abominable terrorism" such as that carried out by suicide bombers, he condemned what he called "terrorism with a human face," and accused the media of manipulating language "to hide the tragic reality of the facts."

"For example, abortion is called 'voluntary interruption of pregnancy' and not the killing of a defenseless human being, an abortion clinic is given a harmless, even attractive, name: 'centre for reproductive health' and euthanasia is blandly called 'death with dignity'," he said in his address.

Meanwhile, the left has made anti-Semitism fashionable again, but it's not resting on its laurels by a longshot. Bringing anti-Semitism back -- kind of easy. It never really went away.

The real coup is bringing back anti-Catholicsm. How is this any different than turn of the century rants against "Creeping Papistry"?

You know what concerns me?” Rosie O’Donnell asked last week on ABC’s morning gabfest, The View.

“How many Supreme Court judges are Catholic, Barbara?”

"Five,” responds host Barbara Walters.

“Five. How about separation of church and state in America?” asks constitutional law scholar Rosie, after the Court’s sweeping decision upholding a federal law banning partial birth abortion.

Barbara counsels against drawing conclusions, saying “we cannot assume that they did it because they’re Catholic.” But the theologian in Rosie can’t help herself.

“If men could get pregnant,”Rosie opines, “abortion would be a sacrament.”

...

It’s not surprising that Rosie’s remarks have taken off like wildfire on talk radio, with conservative commentator Laura Ingraham leading the outcry. After all, it’s Rosie. This is the same person who shocked blacksmiths across the world with her declaration that September 11th was the “first time in history that fire has ever melted steel.” And the woman who implied that the terrorist attacks were an “inside job.” And the person who said “radical Christianity was just as threatening as radical Islam.”

But Rosie’s comments about last week’s 5-4 abortion decision aren’t as isolated as you may like to believe. Respected thinkers, including the former dean of my law school, are contributing to a growing anti-Catholic backlash over Gonzales v. Carhart.

Here’s what Geoffrey Stone, former law school dean and provost at the University of Chicago, had to say:

“All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who either are Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent. It is mortifying to have to point this out. But it is too obvious, and too telling to ignore,” Stone wrote on the University of Chicago Law School Faculty blog. http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/2007/04/our_faithbased_.html

And why is it telling, Dean Stone?

“Ultimately, the five justices in the majority all fell back on a common argument to justify their position. There is, they say, a compelling moral reason for the result in Gonzales,” Stone writes. “By making this judgment, these justices have failed to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality.”

Read the whole thing.

It seems to me only three religions are now socially permissible: vague new-agey Gaiaism, evangelical atheism, and, of course, Islam.

posted by Ace at 05:22 PM

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