Renamed: Keep Her in Her Place

I guess it wasn't meant to be. I had a profound rant going against the Catholic Church for a new publication on an old topic, subjugating women. I wrote it in an email, tweaked it, selected it, and accidentally hit ctrl+v instead of ctrl+c. Oops. There showed up a new strip from Dan Wheeler's Happy Freaking Ray of Sunshine that I had copied yesterday and sent to a friend. Damn. My selected text went to AOL's Dead Entry Office.

If I had a memory, I could reproduce. Sorry. I recall something about some people being emotional junkies, teetering on the edge of the joy juice rush, and others preferring to hide in the dark, avoiding even an accidental brush up against a real feeling.

I have low blood pressure. I am supposed to write this on my driver's license so that if I am in an accident the hospital won't assume internal bleeding and give me transfusions immediately. I attribute this to my unwillingness to eat anger. I prefer to confront anger, kick around any issues and arguments, and generally keep at it until the issue dies, then walk away from it. If I can't do that, I probably will accept that I can't do anything with the anger and get sleepy. It must be my body's way of diffusing the anger.

I admit my theology is weak. I am an atheist and have been since I was about 7 or 8 and realized I had a choice. My mom was fundamentalist Baptist, and my dad was Episcopalian or something like that. I think maybe my mom also worshipped Edgar Cayce. So my knowledge of religion is probably incorrect. However, I have the impression that the Catholic Church feels women have their place and the men of the church will define it.

They seem to justify this by saying all the apostles were men. Dan Brown, the author, wrote an excellent book of fiction disputing this, but we will never know. It was 2000 years ago. Maybe there were female apostles, but they were too busy cooking, cleaning, raising the children, tending the gardens, slopping the hogs, caring for the horses, keeping the hearth alive, and providing respite care to the elderly members of the extended families to have time to write down their chapters.

The Catholic church refuses to allow half of the world's population to be priests or be seriously involved in running the church because they don't have a penis. Two millennia ago that might have possibly made some sense. Today, it seems they are losing out on a chance to keep up with the needs of the digital world and changing family structures. To insist that the structure not change is like asking a child not to grow. 

While the Pope has not sent me an email asking for my opinion, I think that letting women have some positions of power and influence in the church would breathe some life into it. Letting priests marry could help recruit new seminarians. Personally I would prefer to take marriage counseling advice from someone who at least might take the information to heart some day.

The Vatican is also concerned that we are becoming a world of polymorphous sexuality. Personally, I like the sound of that. It has a nice, blended texture to it. But, no, no, it's bad. A church that was founded on love and acceptance does not allow the concept of different. Someone who is hardwired differently from the accepted norm or chooses to walk down the less trodden sexual paths is banned. At best, you can stay with the church if you become someone else.

Maybe not for me, but the churches fill a vital need in our communities. The Catholic Church is huge and provides needed services and comfort and a sense of love and belonging to millions of people. To refuse to grow with the changing needs of members seems senseless.

I need a nap.