BlogAds is malfunctioning...looks like their domain registration expired.
Removing blogad ads will help?

So, presumably, the Pope is also opposed to surgery for those born with disorders of sex development (formerly known as intersex.) So, in his view, should such people be allowed to choose their sexual identity, or does the Church decide it for them? Or will they be free (or condemned, if they have no choice) to live as God intended with varying degrees of "maleness" and "femaleness" in relationships with whom? What will the Church find acceptable?

Neither life nor sex nor sexuality is as clear cut as black and white (the ends of the spectrum, not the races which are also not clear cut.) It makes life more complicated but also more interesting.

Would life be better if at every turn there were clear cut choices - left is more satisfaction, right is more dollars?

On an amazing trip to India - or was it more of a revelatory trip? - my Indian friends and I encountered three Hijira. They tried to intimidate us. I was curious about them and wanted to greet them. This threw them off track and my dear Indian hosts.

It's all perspective, except that my dear friends were surgeons. They knew more than I. The Hijira were not gay people. They were people who were of indeterminate gender, born with more than one set of genitalia, no genitalia, or genitalia that did not "match" the rest.

India has no funds, or a community, devoted to deciding on and making indeterminate newborns one gender of the other.

Under the radar in the US and Europe infants are assigned a gender and a rigid role based upon the 'sexual assignment' designated by their physician.

We're wandering into territory that has not been explored because it's not 'Popular'.

Funny that our approach and awareness of the rapidly approaching Climate Crisis is making no ground, let alone forging a path to a new energy future, because of the same cultural "norms".

What's normal? What predicts survival of humanity?

What burns human primates off the face of the planet?

The death-throes of organized religion. Pass the popcorn, please....

The difference between arguing rationally with the pope and arguing rationally with drug-addled, schizophrenic derelict is that the derelict isn't wearing 10 kilos of bling.

It seems to me that the Pope is the one who is not accepting people as God made them. Like Ric Warren, he seems to believe homosexuality is a choice despite all the evidence to the contrary.

This whole "natural law" thing as interpreted by the Catholic Church is just a crock. And Benedict is a second-rate intellect.

What's more worrisome as a practical matter is that we now have five of nine SCOTUS justices who are Catholic. Thomas in particular is known to be an adherent of this natural law crap.

I hope that if Obama feels he has to add a Hispanic justice, he can find one who isn't a Catholic.

Up front let me say I've known some good priests and nuns - and some real clinkers. However, maybe in the Pope's vow of celibacy is a blessing as it takes him out of the gene pool. No?

I wonder where celibacy fits into the pope's natural scheme?

Celibate men in dresses, funny hats and Gucci loafers. I always turn to them when I want my sexuality defined. The Catholics, just a "bidness" like any other organized religion, no better than Jim and Tammy Faye Baker

Need any more evidence that the church is totally irrelevant in humanity's development ?

Does anyone expect a Roman Catholic Pope, ie The Pope, to not preach the gospel? After all, he is the Bishop of Rome and occasionally conducts a Mass. My falling out with a prior Pope concerned the doctrine of ’infallibility of the pope’. Attending a Catholic university for my Junior and Senior years did nothing to change my disdain.
The Coptic patriarch of Alexandria also has title of pope, but contrary to popular belief, Patriarch of Constantinople, does not have title of pope.

Let me get this right: an old man who never gets laid, who wears a dress, and a hat that looks remarkably like the head of a penis is lecturing the world about gender and sexuality.

Religon made easy.

Step 1: Believe _____________ despite all the evidence to the contrary."

Fill in the blank with whatever you wish. Flying spaghetti monsters, virgin birth, walking on water (etc).

Step 2: Wear silly costumes and create bizarre rituals.

Step 3: Kill those who disagree.

there is little as unnatural as organized religion.

Hey Hilzoy, here's a weird fact:

In the deeply conservative Islamic Republic of Iran, where the countries 'non-existent' gays are routinely imprisoned and occaisionally executed, transexuality is treated as a legitimate mental illness ('gender dysmorphia') for which sex change operations are regarded as a legitimate treatment. As a state sanctioned 'treatment' for a recognised 'illness', Iranian sex-change operations are therefore, in large part, state funded. Post-operative transexuals are regarded as 'cured' and their post-surgical sexual identity has full legal recognition. They can marry, adopt etc. In one high-profile recent case, the male secretary of a highly respected, very senior Iranian cleric, was given full support by both the state and cleric, when he sought a sex-change operation. Upon its successful completion the cleric and his former male-secretary were married as man and wife.

Given their intolerance of homosexuality, the Iranian state and mullah's willingness to embrace the transgendered (admittedly by pathologising their identity) strikes me as much more remarkable, and noteworthy, than the musty, routine LGBT intolerance of the gowned and bejewelled Pontiff...

I think that the comment that being celibate is hardly natural says it all. Pope Ratzinger will go down in history alongside Bush as one of the worst leaders of a major organization in history. This man has inculcated all the Nazi propaganda as a youth and it guides his thinking to this day. There is no other rational explanation for his behavior and comments.

The Pope seems to be conflating sexuality with sensuality. As long as he mires the Roman Catholic church in that intellectual dishonesty, there will be no valuable discussions with that church on the issue. Write them off as willfully ignorant.

With all due respect to the Pontiff, and to hilzoy who has obviously attended to his words with concern and with serious thought, the Pope's comments are pure incoherent goobledy-gook gibberish to me. It reads like something was lost in a very bad translation from the original Latin -- like, whatever point (if any) he was trying to make about whatever it is he's talking about.

The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition.

Huh ???

Hilzoy seems to think this has something to do with sex change surgery? OK, if you say so. But really I have to agree with commenter "hellslittlestangel" above ... I've encountered schizophrenic homeless people who made more sense.

Gee, when I listen to "the language of creation", I'm forced to think that God must have a reason to have made gays and trans people in all cultures for all of history. If we're going to credit God with creation, then surely He is also creating them.

What that reason is, I don't pretend to know, but there are a lot of things God does that I don't understand, and I thought a whole component of the whole Catholic thing was acceptance of God's will.

As with so many other fascinating complex aspects of the natural world, one could choose to see it as yet another facet of the astounding miracle of God's creation.

Dear danjoaquinoz- What is it that makes you want to pontificate about how bad the Iranians are? Yes they're ridiculously barbaric in thier religous practices but that doesn't excuse abject ignorance and boneheaded stupidity not to mention cruel indifference in others.

So, presumably, the Pope is also opposed to surgery for those born with disorders of sex development (formerly known as intersex.)

I think that the Pope, like many anti-abortion people, is under the impression that all pregnancies go well and birth defects only happen if God decides to punish you for your bad actions. If you give birth to an intersexed child, well, you shouldn't have pissed God off the way you did.

As far as forcing them into gender roles, after reading As Nature Made Him, my husband and I both pledged that if we ever had an intersexed child, there would be NO surgery (except to correct a dangerous condition, like an inability to urinate) until the child was old enough to decide for him/her/zirself.

"listen to the language of creation"

As noted previously, ambiguous physical sexual forms are not unheard of. Are ambiguous mental sexual states so impossible to believe? Either homosexual or transsexual in nature.

Creation, after Adam and Eve and the first round of humanity, became exceedingly messy. Secular folk call it evolution, what do YOU call it?

Denial or exemption from consideration is not a respectable option and a key source of skepticism of religious institutions. Religion has served to answer the difficult questions. Now that a great many questions are answered well by science, religion all too often shrugs or insists that we must be content with not knowing the answer but we mustn't accept the answer science provides. This is a formula for extinction. Step up, your holiness, or spiritually perish.

Taking the Pope's assertion and Hilzoy's counter-argument to their logical conclusion, what would be "natural" for humans would be for all of us to be hunter-gatherers.

That would work very well for 6 1/2 billion people.

Ratzi the Nazi, leading the return to the 15th Century.

Bravo, Hilzoy. Thank you.

Keep in mind that for the vast majority of Catholics in this country, what Bennie the Rat says is of little or no consequence. There is a LONG, well-documented history of American Catholics ignoring pronouncements of the Pope, whoever he might be.

One does not need to assume that Ratzi got his ideas about sexuality from Nazis just because his ideas are nonsensical. That fact can more likely be attributed to the fact that Catholic dogma on sexuality comes from Paul and Augustine, two of the most sexually screwed up people in history. One wasn't getting any and thought no one else should either; the other was a sex maniac that felt guilty about it but didn't want to stop.

"...whatever Christ thought about being transgender, He surely frowned on cruelty and injustice, and that violence against people who are gay, bisexual or transgender is flatly wrong."
There you go, trying to take all the fun out of religion!

Pope Benedict: Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator.

My answer to this is the same as it was decades ago: Ratzi, it's my pecker and my soap and I'll wash it as fast as I want to.

And Catholics worldwide grant a Nazi moral authority...why?

Arguments from 'nature' are a sure sign of intellectual bankruptcy and rational incoherence.

Think about it: if you have a reason to support some position you're defending, you'll give the reason.

But 'nature' or 'it's natural' is not a reason: it is simply a refusal to give a reason. You can take the word 'natural' in almost any argument of this type and replace it with 'because I think so, and that's it', and the content will not change.

I usually try to take religious thinkers and ideas seriously, even if I find many of them making pernicious prouncements and taking pernicious actions in the present. After all, religion has been a major force in shaping human experience for at least 40,000 years, and that's worth taking seriously.

But Ratzinger is clearly doing his best to make me revoke my past tolerance. Toleration ends when you start messing with my life and my beliefs, after all! And the Catholic rackteering organization, much like the Mormon one, has really been doing its best to tread on my toes lately. Enough is enough! (However, individual Catholics and Mormons, as long as they behave like responsible adults instead of deluded tinpot tyrants, continue to get the respect they deserve, like any other person of respect).

If I believed in God, I would pray that the media ignore the Pope.

Who CARES what he thinks! He's just another religious NUT. He wears fancy dresses and criticizes gay people? Give me a break.

He thinks religious leaders should be unmarried men? Oh yeah. They SO understand women, who are slightly more than half the world's population, if I'm correct.

PLEASE, can we just STOP treating religious "news" as real news? Let them promulgate their crazy notions among their believers and STOP taking up good newsprint, liberal blogspace, and ThOUGHT as to their nutty pronouncements.

Just ignore them, and if they don't go away, at least they will be dead to US.

"Does anyone expect a Roman Catholic Pope, ie The Pope, to not preach the gospel?"

Sorry, pious peter, but this crapola isn't "the Gospel." Jesus, Lamb of God, said NOTHING about homosexuality. If anything, he was for loving above all else.

So stuff it. Leviticus ain't the Gospels.

Arguments from 'nature' are a sure sign of intellectual bankruptcy and rational incoherence.

Only if you say "it's natural" without any evidence. I can argue that homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality by pointing to the multiple examples that appear in other species. By this evidence, it's the claim that homosexuality is "unnatural" that is clearly false since it appears in nature all of the time.

Similarly, people who claim that human females are "naturally" monogamous but human males are "naturally" promiscuous are people who completely ignore the reams of evidence from our closest primate relatives, i.e. people who don't understand what actually happens in nature.

"Dear danjoaquinoz- What is it that makes you want to pontificate about how bad the Iranians are?"

Gandalf, my post was about Iran's "remarkable and noteworthy" legal, religious & social "embrace of the transgendered", and the fact that Iranian sex-change operations are, in large part, paid for by the state. I think that's entirely praiseworthy and that was my point. I'm not sure how you misread that as pontificating about how "bad the Iranians are", but that certainly wasn't my intent. I've visited Iran twice and I love the country and its people.

I theink it was put best by Earl Butz, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture commenting on an earlier Pope's rejection of birth control:

"He no playa da game, he no maka da rules."

(Butz was well known for his exquisitely tuned sensitivity to ethnic groups)

I found lots of interesting information on www.washingtonmonthly.com. The post was professionally written and I feel like the author has extensive knowledge in the subject. www.washingtonmonthly.com keep it that way.

uUiptu comment5 ,

nKQJC2 comment3 ,