While I generally have little use for the institutional Roman Catholic Church, Pam's House Blend had a link to a very good article in the National Catholic Reporter that illustrates my prior point about the danger of deference to strongly held religious views, without judgment as to their truthfulness or deeper morality - or lack thereof. (See: http://ncrcafe.org/node/1129).
Unfortunately, the article focuses largely on Islamic fundamentalism and brutality, but sadly the Roman Catholic Church and many fundamentalist Christian denominations are better only by a matter of degrees. For example, take the following quote from the article and substitute fundamentalist Christianity - as the far right of the GOP seek to do in the USA. Do we not end up with a result equally perverted?
In the new constitution, she says: "Islamic Sharia was considered the base source of legislation. This automatically aborted decades of feminist struggles in Iraq. It was an enormous setback in women's status and made Iraq into a country ruled mostly by religion. With the current government, the resulting family law will be one that legalizes polygamy, disciplining of women, stoning of adulteresses and sexual apartheid. The first results were clear in the recent days, when the current Al Jaafari's government passed a resolution of segregating sexes in the universities and colleges.
The temptation, of course, is to say something like, "You know how those people are" or "What kind of a religion is that?" But not so fast: Not too many years ago, in our own country, when high school girls became pregnant, they were not permitted to graduate from our high schools. The boys who impregnated them, on the other hand, walked proudly across the stages to pick up their diplomas. We never said a word. That had something to do with honor, too. His, of course, not hers.
I'm sorry, but hate and bigotry is hate and bigotry, no matter what delusional (or religious belief) is used to justify it.
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