This interview may well be timed solely to coordinate with the release of a book, but it couldn’t go in one of the more “serious” sections of the paper instead?
Bad form, Granny.
Edited to add:
But not as bad form as the Congregation of the Doctine of the Faith (aka the Office of the Holy Inquisition) who ruled that referring to God using the asexual wording “I baptise you in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sanctifier” or “in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer” rather than the traditional wording “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” would render a baptism invalid.
That people might want to indicate that God could rise above gender is blamed on feminists, of course.
Categories: culture wars, gender & feminism, media, religion
Hoyden About Town 
Thank you for introducing me to Emily Maguire, what a great article (especially for OZ press standards). I can’t wait to get started on her books.
While the article didn’t belong in Entertainment, I did find this particularly entertaining:
She argues that instead of focusing on women, rape-prevention education should be targeted at boys and men, saying that not a single women has ever caused her own rape.
“Am I arguing that girls and women shouldn’t be held responsible for their behaviour? Not at all. If a woman drinks to excess, then falls over in the street, loses her wallet and vomits all over her shirt, she has only herself to blame. But rape is not a consequence of getting drunk. It’s a consequence of a man deciding to rape someone.”
Cheers, Kage! Bluemilk thinks she’s marvellous too.
I’m going to be looking out for her books as well.
She’s really good, isn’t she. I was going to quote the bit about the wallet and the vomit and the shirt and the rapist too, but Kage beat me to it.
Pavlov’s Cat’s last blog post..And I haven’t even heard it yet
I don’t even know what to say about that creator, sanctifier thing. I’ve never even thought what the gender nuetral for the Godhead is. Parent, Child and Imaginary Friend?
Ruled invalid by whom would be my question? God?
Tracee Sioux’s last blog post..1 Texas Vote for Hillary
Tracee:
Expecting the Pope or most church leaders to be in sync with our perspectives on the world is expecting the impossible. If you are stuck in a bureaucracy it is very hard to break from its clutches. If that is a regressive bureaucracy, constantly shaped in what it does and how it sees things by centuries of past history, even if you don’t think that way, it is hard to achieve anything ‘modern’ because the system keeps you stuck in the old ways. And because of the age of church leaders (remember, John Paul II when elected was 58, near retirement age in our world but a virtual teenager in church leadership terms, where you only hit major power in your 70s) it is doubly difficult to get in step with the modern world
It is said about the Catholic Church that its leaders are three generations behind the world, the institution three centuries. It relied on tried and tested ideas – if a priest is an alcoholic, move him about so he is so busy started up in new parishes he won’t have time to get bored and drink, if a priest is a child abuser, move him around and the same principle applied. Believing in the sacrament of confession where you wipe away your sins and can start with a clean slate, they thought that if they gave a priest a good talking too, told him ‘now don’t do that again’ and moved him to pastures new, that would be the end of it
If he kept doing it, they’d send him to a counsellor, presume that would cure him and then send him out again. They never grasped the reality that paedophiles can’t be cured, sex-abusers sometimes can be and sometimes can’t, but to be on the safe side should never be put anywhere that children might be
You and I live in a world where we have constant contact with all sorts of people; adults, children, married, divorced, unmarried, sexually active, all races, creeds, sexual orientations
Bishops lived in rarified worlds where usually the only women they met were nuns, most of their friends were priests, and children were something you saw from a distance come Confirmation time. As the cliché goes, become a bishop and you’ll never have a bad meal or hear the truth again. It was hardly surprising if, on the ground, they had no experience that would let them realise the impact of their decision-making. They don’t know gays (well, gays who are out to them) so they have no practical experience of the problems gay people face or even what being gay is. They have little contact with women and can’t marry them, so they have little comprehension from experience on sex outside marriage, on pregnancy, on unwanted pregnancy. They talk about sex ‘being open to procreation’ as if every time people have sex they want to ‘make’ a child. The out of touch ignorance that produced the Pope’s rant at gay marriage, Humanæ Vitæ and other monumental misjudgments was central to their messed up handling of the whole area of clerical sex abuse.
Then there’s the Church’s belief in itself as a God-appointed institution, which means that not only does it not pay much attention to the outside world or listen to it, it believes that it has God on its side and so must be right. (All religions have that idea.) And finally that as a bureaucracy it acts in classic bureaucracy style; slowly, cautious, indecisively and seeing its first duty to protect itself
Throw together a regressive bureaucracy, an out of touch leadership stuck in the past, a governing elite whose careers move them further away from the consequences of their own actions, sexual immaturity thanks to their lifestyle and a messianic belief in their own abilities and it would have been a miracle if the Church had not disastrously messed up its handling of clerical sex abuse, just as it messed up almost everything to do with sex