Bishops, Bibles and tyranny

So let me get this straight, refusing to allow a Church to make its tenets, prohibitions and taboos the law of the land means that Barack Obama has

“cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty”

thus confirming the paranoid fears of Know Nothings and anti-Catholic bigots everywhere. How can we deny that the Arizona Bishop who wrote those words in one out of many letters from Bishops read aloud last Sunday to congregations around the US has perverted the First Amendment to advocate political control of private lives by Churches -- exactly in opposition to the amendment's intent? That intent, of course it precisely to deny such power, or "freedom" if you prefer, to faith based organizations whether elected or not.

I'm sure some will try to dress this up in Sunday clothes, but it's the same old ecclesiastical evil that's been bedeviling us for millennia. What it's about, is the administration's recent decision to make birth control available to women through their private health care plans, thus making "people of faith" second class citizens, according to Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in a display of dishonest, convoluted and perverted logic describing the demand that women be denied their rights in the name of religious freedom. Perhaps he'd like to explain why his organization pretends to hold all the moral cards here and other "faiths" would not be allowed to take rights and freedom away from their women in the name of some mangy god or demiurge -- perhaps not since it would entail exposing his Church's obscene claim to worldwide tyranny over the minds of men (and bodies of women) as Jefferson put it so unambiguously.

"Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”

No they didn't and many of them came to get away from the gruesome and eldritch horrors your ilk have perpetrated in the old country.

Catholics should pray to the Virgin Mary, says he, to "intercede for the nation" since God himself seems uninterested and I would be quite satisfied if that were the extent of this blatant political power grab for which we have to pay through tax policies that allow these plutocratic men of poverty to force their nasty, inhumane policies down our throats as though we were all helpless choir boys and without having to register as a lobby. There's little to suggest that such power would be enough, as anti-democratic and anti-American and inhumane as it may be.

Personally I'd prefer to pray to Dagon or Wotan or Yog-Sothoth, my grandson's teddy bear or even to Anton Kalashnikov that our freedom can continue to endure the unremitting assault from ecclesiastical tyrants of all stripes and as we all know, Yog never forgives anything.

Amen