Well…  not explicitly. 

You see, the Vatican generally opposes the death penalty. However, when the UN proposed a resolution to call on governments worldwide to decriminalize homosexuality, the Vatican said they would oppose it.

You read that right. The Vatican, the arguably most powerful religious institution in the world, doesn’t want to stop radical Islamic governments (and others) from regularly prosecuting and executing people if they diddle the wrong way.

Their justification?

It would “add new categories of those protected from discrimination.” Oh no! We wouldn’t want that! Protecting sexual minorities from discrimination (read: murder) must be one of Ratzinger’s new deadly sins.

Through some equivocal and roundabout reasoning, the Vatican figures that if we stop killing and arresting the gays, then it could result in “reverse discrimination against traditional heterosexual marriage.” Made to choose between sparing homosexuals from state-sponsored murder and granting them tax breaks and legal status, the Vatican doesn’t choose life.

Let there be no confusion – queer rights is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Why does the Secular Student Union exist? What need to we have of IHEU, CFI, and others? This is why. When seemingly benign dogmas lead a person to turn a blind eye to suffering, discrimination, and murder, they must be questioned and tried in the court of human dignity. The Vatican, a relic of an age where the value of a person was measured in tithes, is one of the great evils of our day – working to divide, control, subvert, and dominate the modern human spirit. They are guilty in some of the greatest crimes of omission of the past decade, from attacking condom use in Africa and implicitly spreading AIDS like wildfire to turning a blind eye to the state-sponsored murder of minorities.

We are beyond not needing the Vatican… we now need there to not be a Vatican, or for their dogmas to be so marginalized that they no longer hold power.

The SSU and rational humans across the globe have not yet finished fighting for human rights, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.