NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT

Pope's 'human ecology' remarks
trigger angry gay response




Here's the first Anglophone reaction story I have seen to the Pope's Curia speech - er, to what has been selectively reported about his remarks. Of course, quite predictable!



Rome, Dec. 23 (dpa) - Remarks by Pope Benedict XVI suggesting that safeguarding "human ecology" - intended as the concept of men and women created as distinct beings by God - is as important as "protecting tropical forests" have angered gay rights activists.

The Vatican did not immediately comment Tuesday on the remarks made by the Pontiff the previous day, but the editor of the Holy See's newspaper lamented what he said was criticism based on "prejudice."

"Often there's no willingness to comprehend (the Pope's words) and there is a preference to use every opportunity for polemics which are as sour as they are based on prejudice, but above all baseless," Osservatore Romano editor Giovanni Maria Vian wrote in the daily's Tuesday edition. [See translation posted earlier on this page.]

[This report makes it appear that Vian wrote the comments in connection with the gay protest, but it was a general statement in today's editorial referring to recent virulent attacks in the Italian MSM against the Pope by secularists who dislike the Church's teachings.]

On Monday, Benedict used the English-language term "gender" in a speech delivered in Italian to the Vatican Curia in which he also reiterated Catholic teaching on marriage intended as a union between men and women.

The Catholic Church considers same-sex unions sinful, and the pontiff appeared to criticize these when he noted that "what is often described with the term 'gender,' leads to man's self-emancipation from creation and the creator."

Critics noted how Benedict's remarks came against the backdrop of the Vatican's recent opposition to a proposed resolution at the United Nations seeking to decriminalize homosexuality.

"Gay people have become a real obsession" for the Pope, said Aurelio Mancuso of the Italian rights group Arcigay.

The Catholic Church "has for weeks spoken on the danger posed to the world by homosexuality in dubious statements made to the UN," Mancuso said.

He was referring to the decision last week by Vatican's envoy to the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, not to support the resolution on decriminalizing homosexuality because if approved, according to the Vatican, the document implied the possibility that nations which did not recognize same-sex unions as "matrimony" would face pressure to do so.

Earlier this month the Vatican's chief spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the Roman Catholic Church believes homosexuality must not be considered a crime, but added that initiatives aimed at "putting all forms of sexual orientation on the same level" are wrong.

Homosexuality is currently punishable by law in more than 85 countries.

It is punishable by death in a number of them, including Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen.


Here's the blog by the reporter who wrote the skewed-to-be-inflammatory Reuters report yesterday on the Pope's speech tothe Curia. His headline is even more explicit - and rather absurd - than in the news report:


Pope says saving heterosexuality
like saving the rainforest
Posted by: Phil Stewart


Dec. 22, 2008


Pope Benedict took an unconventional approach today to stand up to what he sees as gender-bending, saying protecting heterosexuality was as important as saving the rainforest.

“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the Pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration. “The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”

The Pope stressed that the Church would defend the traditional roles of “a man and woman, and to ask that this order of creation be respected”.

He turned his attention to those people who call themselves in Italian “gender” or “transgender” — a broad term that includes anyone who doesn’t identify entirely with their assigned sex and can include homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals and others.

[I don't think the Pope was referring to the Italian use of the word 'gender' at all, but to its use in 'gender ideology' as advocated by many in the West, especially in the United Nations. It was English-speaking Americans who first started using the term to distinguish it from 'sex' (as in male and female), claiming that 'gender' is more appropriate - I suppose because gender categories include 'neuter' - and 'non-judgmental'. Where is the world coming to when saying male or female, man or woman, is considered 'judgmental' or, alternately, 'discriminatory'? Oh yes, Spain has legislated out the terms 'mother' and 'father' from its official forms - I believe it is now Parent A and Parent B instead. )

“What’s often expressed and understood with the term ‘gender’, is summed up definitively in the self-emancipation of man from the created and the Creator … But in this way, he lives in opposition to truth, he lives in opposition to the Creator,” the Pope said.

The New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission reacted promptly*, saying: “In a season in which the immorality of genocide, lawless governments, lust for money and power and the destabilization of the world’s economy are destroying the lives of hundreds of millions around the world, the Pope’s obsessive focus on gay, lesbian and trans people who simply seek the right to live and love is out of touch with what humanity needs right now from its religious leaders.”

[*And the prompt reaction was to Stewart's original skewed report, of course, because I doubt that anyone at IGLHRC read the Pope's full statement at all - even just the paragraphs that refer to their concern.]

What do you think of Benedict’s idea of an “ecology of man”?



Frankly, my first reaction when I heard the Holy Father refer to the 'foreste tropicali' (I listened to Vatican Radio's live broadcast) was that he was indirectly addressing those misguided ultra-environmentalists who would preserve exotic plants and animals even at the expense of humans.

I still think that was the context for his remark on the tropical rainforests - and thus, the very opposite of what Stewart and the gay groups would make it appear - that he is equiparating people with rainforests (giving them the same value on every scale), just as ultraliberals would equiparate same-sex unions to traditional marriage.

****

The deliberate distortion of what the Pope said about male and female being the natural order of creation is only getting worse.... This is from the Times of London today - whose headline parrots Reuters's original report but takes the absurdity one step further.

As for the Pope stoking homophobia - when he did not even mention homosexuals or homosexuality at all - who is stoking what? What about all the Pope-phobia that the MSM are stoking - and have been stoking from Day 1 of Benedict's Pontificate?

I will not comment any further besides pointing out where and how this report primes its own 'stoking'.


Pope accused of stoking homophobia
after he equates homosexuality
to climate change
by Philippe Naughton

Dec. 23, 2008

Pope Benedict was accused of stoking homophobia today after a speech in which he declared that saving humanity from homosexuality was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

The Pontiff made the remarks yesterday in an end-of-year address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration. He said that humanity needed to listen to the "language of creation" to understand the intended roles of man and woman and behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations was a "destruction of God’s work".

[The underlined statements are the reporter's extrapolations obviously designed to skew what the Pope really said.]

"The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less," he told scores of prelates gathered in the Vatican's Clementine Hall.

"What’s needed is something like a ‘human ecology,’ understood in the right sense. It’s not simply an outdated metaphysics if the Church speaks of the nature of the human person as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected."

It is not the first time that the Pope has used the Curia speech to throw out a controversial idea – two years ago he complained that Islam had yet to learn the lessons of the Enlightenment – but the comments were quickly denounced by gay and lesbian groups, both inside and outside the Church.

The Rev Sharon Ferguson, chief executive of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, described the Pope's comments as "totally irresponsible and unacceptable in any shape or form".

She said: "It is more the case that we need to be saved from his comments. It is comments like that that justify homophobic bullying that goes on in schools and it is comments like that that justify gay-bashing.

"There are still so many instances of people being killed around the world, including in Western society, purely and simply because of their sexual orientation or their gender identity.

"When you have religious leaders like that making that sort of statement then followers feel they are justified in behaving in an aggressive and violent way because they feel that they are doing God’s work in ridding the world of these people."

Her views were echoed by the Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney and president of Inclusive Church, the pro-gay Anglican movement. "I thought the Christmas angels said ’Fear not’. Instead, the Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet. And that’s just absurd ... Can’t he think of something better to say at Christmas?"

Pam Spaulding, a leading lesbian blogger from the United States, was even more direct. She said: "The Prada Papa Ratzi opens his trap again, and the homophobia stinks like trash piled up during a NYC garbage strike."

The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality "a deviation, an irregularity, a wound".

The Pope's speech was also seen, however, as a denunciation of "gender theory" – the study of how gender assignments affects the behaviour of individuals. The Catholic Church has repeatedly spoken out against gender theory, which gay and transsexual groups promote as a key to understanding and tolerance.

"That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’ in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator," the Pope said.

"Human beings want to do everything by themselves, and to control exclusively everything that regards them. But in this way, the human person lives against the truth, against the Creator Spirit."

Mark Dowd, campaign strategist at Operation Noah, the Christian environmental group, who is a gay man and a former Dominican friar, said that the Pope’s remarks were "understandable but misguided and unfortunate".

He said that he understood the Pope’s vision of creation in which rainforests were protected and men and women "complement one another, reproduce and live happily ever after".

But he said: "The problem is that if you study ecology seriously as any intelligent man would do, and the Pope is a fantastically intelligent man, you realise that ecology is complex, it has all sort of weird interdependencies and it is the same with human sexuality.

"It is not a one-size-fits-all model, there are lots of differences, so therefore I think it is really sad that these comments betray a lack of openess to the complexity of creation."


I'm almost tempted to open a thread called TOXIC WASTES just to dump such poison into. Unfortunately we can't just ignore all these negative things - WHICH i WILL NOW LABEL WITH TEH INTERNATIONAL WARNING SIGNS OF toxicity and lethal danger - because even when they are not purveyed in the most high-profile media outlets (which in this case they are), even the slightest hint of 'scandal/sensation' in any remote, unheard of source, gets to be rehashed/exaggerated/distorted/amplified ad infinitum on the Internet.... all of it based on prejudiced reporting.