it has been a tough time for god -- the continued labile affect for more than a decade -- except for two brief moments of restraint, the first week of last November, and for a few hours on Jan 20 of this year...

otherwise, it has been incessant weeping, as god has tried to get her shit together to no effect...

Just in time for the Vatican's statement, there's been a scandal in the Catholic church in Canada involving a bishop, child pornography on his seized laptop and an even older investigation of the Catholic church in 1989: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/10/02/nl-earle-lahey-102.html

Not sure which I find more disturbing -the casual disregard for the separation of church and state at the Red Mass, or the fact that is is INVITATION ONLY. An invitation only worship service? WTF?

A note to Archbishop Silvano Tomasi:

The criticism isn't that you have a higher than normal amount of sex deviants in your ranks, it's your practice of sweeping your 5% deviant's victims under the rug while quietly shuffling the priest/parish deck. WTF, this kind of blame shift and finger pointing is straight out of a republican-style playbook. This "everybody has this statistic, stop picking on us" nonsense is meant to sound reasonable to dimwits who don't realize you just shifted your argument away from your leadership's complicity toward a truthful statistic that you use to white wash yourselves as the new victims. As a catholic, I say, fuck you, rot in hell.

Only a 1 in 20 chance of getting molested by your priest? That's all?
That 5% statistic is great if you tell me I have that as a chance to win $1 million. Being young and at a Catholic retreat wih 20 priests, uhm, not so much...

Hah!

Ahmadinejad was born Jewish.

http://rawstory.com/2009/10/report-mahmoud-ahmadinejad-was-born-a-jew/

No vert like convert?

I think I figured out what "conservative" means. They talked about how John Paul II was a "liberal" pope, which is why they wanted Ratzinger, because he was a "conservative" pope. And this was all a bit confusing, as they not only hold the same positions, but due to the nature of the popery, there shouldn't BE much disagreement between them.

And now i get it: Being conservative means acting like a defiant douchebag. It's not that there's any real shift here, as JPII probably had more hidden perverts than Ratzinger does. The difference is that they have to be dicks about it. Similarly, they're more in your face about condoms, abortions, etc. That's what it's all about.

And it also explains why American conservatives are really not too far off from liberals, which is why they have to invent absurd caricatures of liberals in order to keep attacking us. It's not that they have a fundamentally different view of what our government should do. They just like to be dicks.

I think you should probably provide some background on this. The cross was erected in 1934 on private land. The land became federal property in 1994 and naturally, someone complained. Eventually government transferred the land to a private group in exchange for 5 times as much land surrounded or right next to the government land. ALCU is saying the land transfer was unconstitutional (I am not sure why) as an establishment of religion.

Personally I think I have to side with the cross boosters on this one.

And Land is usually one of the saner members of the religious right. Not anymore.

Ah, but the Nazis I believe eventually began killing off Germans who were mentally deficient --- my guess is that most of our mentally deficient are unable to hold jobs and thus don't have health care. So they die when they're sick. Lilke my aunt, who had breast cancer, but was, as we used to say, 'retarded.' It is the Republicans, obviously, who are far closer to the Nazi model.

Who's saying JP II was a liberal pope?

Granted, the left-right dichotomy doesn't work too well with popes, but I don't think anybody would call JPII a liberal. One reason we got Benedict is because most of the cardinals were appointed by JPII.

I'm still unclear why it's called a Red Mass (do they sacrifice a goat), but I found this part interesting:

One member of the court who no longer attends is Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, like Breyer, is Jewish. Ginsberg said she grew tired of being lectured to by Catholic officials.

"I went one year, and I will never go again, because this sermon was outrageously anti-abortion," Ginsburg said in the book "Stars of David: Prominent Jews talk About Being Jewish" by author Abigail Pogrebin.

"Even the Scalias, although they're much of that persuasion, were embarrassed for me."

Well, at least they don't get lectured about pedophilia.

Ginsberg said she grew tired of being lectured to by Catholic officials.

I imagine that she gets enough of that from the 6 Catholics on the Supreme Court.

MNpundit: No, the land was not private when the cross was erected, it was under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, it just became a National Preserve in 1994, although the article notes that the guy who erected the cross probably did not know that it was on public land. I've actually been to this preserve several times, near the area where the cross is, and can't say I have noticed it. The issue with the consitutionality of the land swap, which I admit is a bit arcane, it that the PURPOSE of the land swap was to allow the cross to be maintained where it is and therefore it was a govenment action designed to promote religion. (The cross doesn't have any particular historical significance, the original cross rotted away long ago, this is the second replacement of it, and it was only stuck up there in 1998.) I think its a close call, since there are other parcels of privately owned land in the reserve, and the owners could stick up a cross (or a big middle finger, or whatever) on them, and there would be no way for a visitor to the preserve to know whether or not the cross (etc.) was on public or private land. I suspect the court will take refuge in the private land argument, and really, its hard to get your shorts in a knot over this, but I do think that the idea of a private entity being able to say to the government "I want this piece of land for a religious purpose, so you have to give it to me" is kind of a dangerous one.

Personally I think I have to side with the cross boosters on this one.

I agree. The cross is plainly a historical monument, not a religious one. The ACLU is veering into "Taliban destruction of Buddhist statues" territory on this one.

(The cross doesn't have any particular historical significance, the original cross rotted away long ago, this is the second replacement of it, and it was only stuck up there in 1998.)

Bad logic. There are plenty of monuments that are modern replacements of older monuments that rotted away long ago. That does not make them of insignificant historical value. The value of all monuments is in the representation.

Only a 1 in 20 chance of getting molested by your priest? That's all?
That 5% statistic is great if you tell me I have that as a chance to win $1 million. Being young and at a Catholic retreat wih 20 priests, uhm, not so much...

It should be noted that Benen misrepresented what the Vatican rep said, which is that research has found 1.5% to 5% of Catholic clergy involved in sex abuse.

Which, btw, is much less than the general population.

"The cross is plainly a historic monument, not a religious one."

Plainly; after all how could anyone look at a monument with a cross and come to the conclusion that it's a religious one?

I'm with Matt (@11:04). Mass by invitation only??? What is it? A cocktail party? Heaven and Hell are that way (by invitation only), the wedding at Caana (spell?) probably was too but, a MASS??? Even if I weren't an atheist... even if I were a Catholic... I don't think I'd want to attend such an elitist and fundamentally irreligious event. Disgusting.

Doctor Biobrain: They just like to be dicks.

I really believe it is as simple as that in many cases.

And, as a former elementary school bully-magnet, I feel like I know these people all too well.

I wonder if the Red Mass participants, are OK with SCOTUS' likely giving the nod to corporations being granted (they sure don't "have" them) the same speech rights as real people? I hope not, since corporations aren't "people" in any authentic religious tradition (even if many Republican Christianists think of them that way.)

Land said. Reports were unclear as to whether Land has suffered any kind of head trauma recently that leads him to say insane things.

No - he's just a good Southern Baptist. You know, the chruch originally founded in 1859 to defend the divine right of slavery? The church that's spent the past 100 years in public displays of ignorance as they founded American Fundamentalism? The church of the South???

No need to say more.

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