My questions aren't for all of you. My questions are directed at those of that are objecting to President Obama speaking at Notre Dame. I know, this is old news. But, this is the straw that is breaking the proverbial camel's back...and mine.
I find your outrage over President Obama's support of limited stem cell research, and his funding for family planning clinics, fake.
Many Catholics are angered by Obama's planned appearance at the May 17 ceremony because of his decisions to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and international family planning groups that provide abortions or educate about the procedure.
And here is why I find your outrage fake.
Family Planning Clinics and the spread of AIDS in Africa.
I would like to know why you aren't outraged about this. The Pope doesn't like condoms.
Pope Benedict XVI is a man of enormous authority.
When he says "don't use condoms - even to prevent the spread of Aids" it has a significant impact among tens, even hundreds of millions of people.
The Pope is taking his anti-latex campaign to Africa.
The Church has been growing more quickly in Africa than anywhere else, and this is the Pope's first visit there in the four years he has been the spiritual leader of the world's approximately one billion Catholics.
With Africans - 22 million of whom are infected with HIV - hanging on his every word, that made his statement aboard the plane heading to Cameroon this week all the more significant.
Twenty-two million Africans are infected with HIV. 22 MILLION. Family planning clinics and basic health education, including distribution of free condoms, could have spared some of them from infection and death.
Don't even start with me about abstinence and the Rhythm Method. If all practicing Catholics in the U.S. were only using this method of birth control, we would still have the large Catholic families today that I grew up with in the early '60's.
Rape and Excommunication
Where is your outrage when the church excommunicates a little girl who has been raped?
Brazil's health minister accused the Roman Catholic Church on Thursday of an "extreme" and "inadequate" position in opposing an abortion for a 9-year-old girl suspected to have been raped by her stepfather.
Doctors in the northeastern city of Recife performed the abortion on Wednesday after deciding that the girl could have died if her pregnancy with twins was allowed to continue. According to media reports, the girl was nearly four months pregnant.
The Catholic Church's archbishop for the area criticized the decision as against "the law of God" and excommunicated her mother, the doctors and other people involved in the abortion.
Where is your compassion? Why would anyone want a little girl to carry her twin pregnancy to term when she had been violently raped at 9 years old? Nine years old.
Sexual Molestation of Children
I am not going to document the countless children that have been molested by Priests over the past couple-of-hundred years. But I ask you this, have you ever wondered where these troubled Priests go when the church discovers they like to have sex with children?
The Pope sends them to my state. They come to a white-washed bastion of serenity located in a mountain village in the Jemez Mountains called The Servants of the Paracletes(SOTP).
Here, in the Jemez Mountains, pedophile Priests are rehabilitated and then shuffled onto a new Parish, full of unsuspecting families, where they can molest again. The founder of the SOTP, Reverand Gerald Fitzgerald, appears to have had some good intentions when he first established SOTP. He knew, as early as 1950, that these Priests couldn't be rehabilitated and should be sequestered on an island to keep them away from children.
As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.
Where is your outrage? Why aren't you at the Vatican, right now, demanding answers from the numerous Bishops who participated in the pedophile Priest transfer game? Why aren't you working with the Catholic families of those molested children? I know several adults that were sexually molested by Catholic Priests when they were children. Their lives are still scarred by what happened to them.
The Separation of Church and State
Where was your outrage when the church was flexing its polical muscle the last election?
Look at this.
And this.
I don't believe, for a nanosecond, that all Catholics didn't vote for President Obama.
The church is flexing its political muscle, again, in New Mexico. It isn't just the Catholic church that fought against SB12 in my state, it was a variety of religious organizations that influenced the defeat of a basic human rights bill. But the Catholic church was influential in strong arming several Democrats. From Democracy for New Mexico.
For those of you at Notre Dame that are outraged at an upcoming speech, please tell me, why aren't you asking hard questions of your Priests, Deacons, Bishops, Cardinals...and...the Pope?
I am frustrated with those of you who think that a blastocyst has more rights than living, breathing men, women and children. I am frustrated that your outrage is over a speech, by our President, and not at the spread of HIV and AIDS, death, rape, human suffering and political strongarming.