Saturday, April 22, 2006

Condoms for Catholics? Well, Yes. Er, No.

I've been beating up on the poor conservative Christians for their deadly homophobia, so I thought I might as well mention, speaking of deadly, how insane the Catholic Church is on the subject of condoms and AIDS. Everyone knows about their completely irrational war against condoms to prevent HIV, even going to the point of lying about the effectiveness of condoms. But what I didn't know was that, officially, they are against married couples using condoms EVEN IF ONE OF THE PARTNERS HAS AIDS!

However, a powerful cardinal,Carlo Maria Martini (AP Photo/Luca Bruno), has departed from the official Vatican position. Here is the story in Sploid:
A powerful Vatican cardinal who nearly became pope last year has taken the radical position of saying it might be okay to use a condom -- but only with your spouse, and only if your spouse has AIDS, and only if you haven't caught the disease yet.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini's comments are seen by Vatican experts as being crazily liberal, because the official Holy See rule is that condoms can never be used.

Bible scholars have long been confused by the Vatican's strict stance on rubbers, because there's nothing in the Bible about condoms.

The Church is so furiously anti-condom that it actually runs a global disinformation campaign to try to convince people that condoms offer no protection against sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it surfaced in the 1980s and more than 40 million are currently infected, mostly in Africa. But Vatican officials say 25 million corpses and 11 million "AIDS orphans" is nothing compared to the make-believe sin of somebody using a condom.
The church's position on condoms, IMO, is nothing less than murder. First they make up a sin out of whole cloth and then they use it even in the face of death. The gay community learned in the late 80s that condoms, when used properly, were almost 100% effective in stopping HIV, but that doesn't keep religious ideologues from spreading lies and disinformation in the name of God.

4 comments:

Christine Bakke said...

Wow, I had no idea.

I mean, I've gotten kind of used to the idea of being labelled "intrinsically disordered" and have started to wear it with pride.

But I'd no idea the Catholic church was so against something that could save so many lives!

That's appalling.

Steve Schalchlin said...

What's clear is that the RC has taken a VERY extreme position on condoms, which makes no sense since it's not remotely the kind of issue discussed anywhere in the Bible. That they would take such a hard line makes absolutely no sense to me at all, especially given the lip service they pay to the sacredness of life. Their policies kill. This is what happens when people become fanatically religious. They lose sight of the very reason they were religious to begin with.

Bev Sykes said...

According to the church condoms, along with IUDs and even RHYTHM interferes with God's plan for procreation, so all are verboten. Catholics aren't supposed to engage in sex which doesn't have some possibility of producing a new life. (I guess after menopause, you get to have sex because you've already paid your dues--and if God wants you to have a baby at age 70, he'll find a way, so long as you don't do anything to prevent it.)

Anonymous said...

In the olden days they believed that babies came from sperm and that women were just baby ovens. (Thus the rule about not letting your seed touch the ground.) This could almost be seen as a predessor to the pro-life movement. Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great... when a sperm gets wasted God gets quite irate.

They believed that sperm were little babies just waiting to happen so wasting sperm was like killing a baby.

This is where the whole 'don't use a condomn' thing comes from.