The Cat-o-lick folks in Australia are getting special treatment with laws made just for them against anyone causing “annoyance” to pilgrims attending Catholic World Youth day next week. These laws came just a day after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called on all Australians to show the Pope “respect” during his visit.

Protesters plan an “annoying” anti-pope fashion show which violates the new laws and “could attract a penalty of up to 5,500 dollars, prompting one designer last week to come up with a T-shirt reading “$5,500, a small price to pay for annoying Catholics.”

Anti-Pope fashion parade held ahead of Australian visit

“They are not from Milan,” acknowledged Rachel Evans, spokeswoman of the NoToPope group, as T-shirts featuring slogans such as “The Pope is wrong, put a condom on” were displayed outside the New South Wales state parliament.

Other shirts, which are selling for 20 dollars (19 US), read “Pope go homo”, “There is no God” and “Does the history of your church annoy you?”

Among the most graphic was one featuring Benedict XVI standing with arms outstretched but with pointed, red devil ears and a tail superimposed on the image under the slogan “Chief homophobe”.

NoToPope, a coalition including Christians, atheists and gay groups, was protesting at new regulations giving police power to stop conduct that “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants” in World Youth Day.

Link to full story

First, a shout-out to the Ron-ster for updating this site and damning all of our souls to hell. Thanks, Chief…

Builder of Planned Parenthood project in Portland pulls out: Walsh Construction didn’t want to deal with aggressive anti-abortion protesters

[...] When Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette signed on as the anchor tenant, Walsh said, he called builders in other cities who had dealt with aggressive anti-abortion activists. He was told that protesters had gone as far as staking out contractors’ homes. “It’s disruptive and very threatening,” he said. “I just didn’t want to put my family through that.” [...] Bill Diss, one of the organizers of the local protest, said the effort is designed to remind the businesses involved in the project whom they’re working for. He called Planned Parenthood a “killing center” that targets young girls, teaching them about sex and masturbation, which he called “the gateway drug to lust.” “They’re up in North Portland targeting young black girls to get them into a life of sex,” said Diss, a science teacher at Portland’s Benson High.

Teaching girls about masturbation? The gateway drug to lust? Say it ain’t so! (I’m assuming that boys can jerk-off as much as they want. But girls?)

And the fact that this dildo’s a science teacher cracks me up even more.

Yes, let’s stop promoting birth control to young people. As we all know, abstinence-only programs are really the best…

Go, Bill Diss! Teach those young people! Show them what’s what!

I ran across this while doing a search for something else,and I thought it was quite comical, and is a fitting follow-up to my last post. Not only is God answering prayers for special favors to win golf games, and football games, etc, he is now got his own sex toy advice hotline! No wonder he can’t save people from all these natural disasters, disease, famine, abuse, neglect, etc. He’s much, much too busy with other things, like Joy Wilson’s sex life.

The Joy of Christian Sex Toys

NPR.org, March 21, 2008 · Joy Wilson went looking for something to spice up her marriage without compromising her Christian beliefs.

Finding nothing, she founded her own “sin-free” sex toy business. Book22.com caters to the Christian community with books, toys and occasional advice. The name refers to the Song of Solomon, the extended love poem that forms the 22nd book of the Bible.

Wilson says that after the birth of her first child, she had trouble rekindling her desire for intimacy. She and her husband went looking for marital aids, and found that Internet searches for products as tame as massage oil led to sites with pornographic images. “I was really surprised that it was that bad,” she says.

She and her husband talked it over and decided that there must be a way for conservative people to add a spark to their romantic lives. She says their site steers clear of certain types of sexual activity that they believe are unholy. And they carefully consider which new products to add.

“We pray about things before we add them to our site,” she says. “We live our lives very openly in front of Jesus, so we just kind of pray for direction about which way he would have us go, and I have to be honest with you — he’s really surprised us. … Almost our whole entire ’special order’ page has come about from that.”

Wilson says she and her husband are blessed with good health, but that God has shown them that other couples might need help from a particular toy.

On our blog, an open thread: Sex toys as a Christian ministry.

Vatican: Excommunication for Female Priests

Vatican City - The Vatican insisted Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by excluding females from the priesthood as it issued a new warning that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated. [...] The church has always banned the ordination of women by stating that the priesthood is reserved for males. The new decree is explicit in its reference to women. “The church does not feel authorized to change the will of its founder Jesus Christ,” Amato said in an interview prepared for Vatican Radio that was released to reporters. The reference is to Christ’s having chosen only men as his Apostles. [...] In March, the archbishop of St. Louis excommunicated three women - two Americans and a South African - for participating in a woman’s ordination. They were part of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement, which began in 2002. The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a “crime.” The congregation said it acted to “preserve the nature and validity of the sacrament” of ordination. The decree - signed by the congregation’s head, American Cardinal William Levada - said anyone trying to ordain a woman and any woman who attempts to receive the ordination would incur automatic excommunication. [...] Catholics who are excommunicated cannot receive the sacraments. Amato said the penalty can be lifted if those so punished are sincerely repentant.

You know, like Galileo…

I’ve never looked at a fish in a sexual manner.

From Paul Walsh of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

“Seems that one person’s smut is another person’s morning latte.

A Christian group based in San Diego found grounds for outrage over the new retro-style logo for Starbucks Coffee.

The Resistance- (warning: utter Ron Paul, holocaust denying fuckwittery with this click!) says the new image ‘has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,’ Mark Dice, founder of the group, said in a news release. ‘Need I say more? It’s extremely poor taste, and the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.’”

Well, Mark, while the mermaid on the logo does reveal she’s a member of the IBTC- if you don’t know, I ain’t telling), those spread legs you so loath are not legs at all but tails, two of them. Did I mention she’s a mermaid, Mark? You do know that mermaids don’t exist, right? Then again, I suppose if Gob exists to this douchebag, mermaids aren’t much of a stretch.
It kind of relates back to KA’s devil of a previous post. These folks are looking for attacks from every direction. The devil- and his ubiquitous temptations- must exist because, otherwise, well, they’d just be good ol’ fashioned paranoid.

Living here in Cincinnati, I get a little misty eyed with nostalgia for the good old days of the satanic logo used by Proctor & Gamble(based right downtown in the Dolly Parton Towers) and the company’s reputed ties to the Satanic Church. This urban legend started back in the sixties and though thoroughly debunked raised it’s head again as late as 2005. P & G even won a lawsuit against Amway for knowingly spreading the same rumor to boost their cult’s sales- theoretically competing products and all.

Aside from their pathetic delusions, we live in a free society. With freedom comes responsibility and, quite frankly, not everyone takes that responsibility seriously. Inevitably, someone is gonna expose your children to vulgarity of one sort or another, someone will stretch the bonds of decency all out of shape, someone will offend your sensibilities even as you offend someone else’s. We all know what falls outside our personal codes of conduct and ethics. We know this is how far we’ll go and no further.

Nothing that goes on in this big old world holds any sway over how I live my life, over what I believe or don’t believe. Sure, the beliefs can evolve over time with new information and new perspective, through conversation and debate but, at the core, they are strong enough to survive intact in any world I find myself in. From all the available evidence, christinsanity just doesn’t measure up. It’s constant imaginary persecution from every direction, it’s the constant fear that this world will capture the children because either their god is so weak- or their faith in him is, that totalitarian legislative stopgaps and privileges are all that stand between them and, gasp, godlessness. Fuckers. Old Scratch’s favorite… …peanut butter logo>

Don’t these fundies have better things to do like feed the poor, help the homeless or some earthquake survivors or something? Or maybe go take a few U.S Government courses at the local community college for a refresher on what separation of church and state actually means.

Religious Right activists want to see their religious perspective on marriage imposed on everyone.

From Joseph L. Conn at Americans United:

Marriage Spat: Calif. Supreme Court Decision Sparks Church-State Discussion

The California Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage has opened an important discussion about the relationship between religion and government. The justices in the court majority made it clear that they were ruling in favor of civil-marriage equality and not religion. Religious communities will remain free to perform same-sex marriages or not, as their theology dictates.

A lot of people rightly see that as an important expression of judicial respect for the separation of church and state.

*snip*

According to Baptist Press, the Rev. Barrett Duke, vice president for governmental affairs for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said he was “saddened for the people of California.”

“The California Supreme Court ruling not only overruled the very clear will of the people, it also proposes to overrule God’s design,” Duke said. “These judges may think they know more about marriage than the rest of us, but I am confident they don’t know more about marriage than God. Marriage is the union of one man and one woman….That’s not only my opinion and the opinion of most of the people in this country, it’s God’s opinion, and His opinion overrules the opinion of any judges.”

The Rev. Clyde Grubbs, pastor of the Pasadena’s Throop Unitarian Universalist Church says:

“Our religion is in favor of (gay) people getting married, and they are saying that under someone else’s religion, that is wrong,” said Grubbs. “There is no secular reason for that position, so it must be a religious test and a violation of the First Amendment.”

The Religious Right needs to give this up and just let people live their lives.

This is getting to be like Jesus Matrix! So many claiming to be Jesus, and so many sheeple who will believe them. And when you get rid of one, more just come out of the woodwork. Never ending supply of Jeebus nutjobs.

Wayne Bent of New Mexico is yet another one claiming to be Jesus. He is going through the whole martyr act, fasting and refusing to eat, and claiming total innocence. He is accused of laying naked with underage virgins. He has also admitted to having sex with a couple of married women and another woman who is “of-age” (which he claims was instructed by Gawd…yeah…ok).

One thing in this news video that got me is how the son of Mr. Bent says that the authorities have “stepped over the line, by forcing children to go into an environment they do not want to go into. Yet these children have been forced to remain isolated in a compound and brainwashed to believe this is where they should be and that there is nothing wrong with sleeping naked with a creepy old fuck.

What will happen to all of these kids when they finally grow up?

Church leader arrested on sex charges in northeast N.M.

A posting attributed to Bent on the church’s Web site Monday said:

“Jesus had not committed any crimes, so the authorities had to invent some crimes to crucify him over. It is the same for me also. I have committed no crimes, but many crimes are being imagined and concocted in the minds of men to try and kill me again.”

Latest news video link: Strong City Cult

I’d like to dedicate this post to my wife, and Stardust, and all of those atheist mommies everywhere…

YAY, UTERUS!…