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The Catholic church has been more than willing to stand idly by and allow women to die from tubal pregnancies rather than intervene to save a life. They put more value on a little cluster of nonviable cells than they do the life of the woman. Given the scale of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, there is simply no possible way the church hierarchy could have been unaware of it. Until these things began to be taken seriously by the media and civil authorities, the church circled the wagons, protected the priests, and blamed the victims. No thank you Mr. Pope. I don't care what you think about anything.

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Along with unforgivable cruelty and life destroying rapes of our children, the Catholic Church, which I am still in recovery from, is also mostly responsible for some of the most deadly wars ever fought.

Occasionally a pope will shed a glimmer of light, indicating hope for a more modern thinking church. But, the darkness of their past always reclaims them.

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+++ My faith was dangling by a thread when I listened to an idiot priest in Vietnam give us a 'kill a Commie for Christ' pep talk, and he took a chainsaw to it. I walked away and never looked back. That was fifty five years ago.

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Welcome Home.

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TY

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Sep 17
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I'm glad you found your way out. There are no bad reasons for leaving religion.

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*internet hugs* if you want them.

Your insight in the last line is so powerful. I really thought Francis was more educated, and thus, enlightened.

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Well said Oraxx!

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All of the above. Thank you.

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Harris supports the Palestinian genocide.

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I don't think so. When exactly did she make that statement?

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I've been told she fought against it more than Biden did, which doesn't say a lot. I'm just a stupid optimist though, I always think it's gonna get better, and occasionally it does; (but just occasionally ... and I am let down more than not)

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I’m glad you brought up the Magdalene scandal. Please don’t forget the Catholic Church’s role in kidnapping Indigenous children and then maltreating and sometimes killing those children in Canada. Residential schools operated into the 1990s. Just horrific.

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The Pope is the Advocate in Chief for Patriarchy. What he is advocating is simply the idea that Women are nothing but incubators and domestic slaves whose lives should revolve around the families they are required to produce. The bible teaches that a woman without children is incomplete and hubby is justified in siring children on the purchased domestic slaves to carry on the line... Never a thought given to the fact that hubby might be shooting blanks. The evilgelicals are no better in their pursuit of biblical families. Most of them would do well to look at Betty Bower's treatment of biblical families. My medical school OB/GYN professor called pregnancy "a pathological state" and there are plenty of good medical reasons to terminate one. When hPope Frank can show me a soul entering a newly fertilized egg, I'll think about it.

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I doubt many pro-life people have ever really thought about the issue and are just parroting what Aquinas said in the Middle Ages. Patriarchy is one of the greatest sins of the Christian church.

Christian nationalism and white bigotry are threatening the foundation of country's democracy. We MUST work diligently to maintain the separation of church and state.

I love wearing this "This is our home, not your church" tee everywhere I go 👇

https://libtees-2.creator-spring.com/listing/noch

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Please do not repeat their marketing term. They aren't "pro-life" They love prisoner executions, war against anyone of a different flavor of religion, war in general, not masking to protect others during Covid, and insisted on going to church, further spreading and contributing to mutations, Won't fund children's school lunches, and want to pollute and trash the Earth because they think climate change isn't real.

Oh and they are causing actual born persons to die because they hate abortions. They are "Forced Birthers".

https://www.printmag.com/political-design/the-semiotics-of-a-movement-how-pro-life-became-a-marketing-campaign/

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Protecting life, eh? Is that what you call it when the members of your cult (eh, church) continue to sexually molest little boys and girls who have no voice, no one to really protect them from your predators in robes? You may not be quite the religious fascist as your predecessor, but you're anything but an open-minded and accepting leader. My thoughts about you, Catholicism, and Christianity in general is a really, really big... FU and the Pope Mobile you rode in on!

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How many young people ended their own lives because of what their priest did to them? That blood is on his hands.

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Sep 14Edited

But...but...they forgave themselves on behalf of God. No harm, no foul, right?

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Well said Hank!

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Well put and spot on.

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How. Fucking. Dare. He. For those who don't know his history, Bergoglio (birth name; his throne name is Francis) is a long-time criminal, and I'm not just talking about the RCC's cover-up of child rape. He's from Argentina, and was the highest-ranking church official in that country during the "dirty war" of the 70s and 80s. A conservative estimate is that 30,000 people were murdered by the state during that period, and that doesn't even begin to account for the numbers of people who were imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, and much more. The church had to have been involved in the massive program of trafficking babies of prisoners and the disappeared to military families (apparently learning from Francoist Spain, where the same thing happened at scale for 40 years.) And Bergoglio was a close, personal friend of General Jorge Videla, the brutal, fascist dictator of Argentina. (Don't believe me? Google "Bergoglio and Videla" to see photos of the two of them walking in a garden, arm-in-arm, broad smiles on their faces.) There's no way in the world that Bergoglio could claim not to know something that everybody in the country knew at the time. At the very best (low bar, here) he was complicit in the horrors; at least he knew that the clergy under him were blessing the torturers, and did zero about it. So, I'd take any "moral" pronouncement this criminal--and, frankly, any of his buddies--makes with about a ton of salt. Telling anybody at all how to live their lives is way, way out of line!

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Vatican City and dictators have walked arm-in-arm for longer than I care to think. It's not a bug; it's a feature. And now that I think about it, I wonder at what the papacy's reaction was when the United States was formed as a SECULAR nation, without the supposed benefit of godly interference.

I may have to look that up sometime.

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Don't know about that specifically, but 19th century papal pronouncements (pope speaking ex cathedra--meaning he claimed to be speaking for his god) had nothing good to say about secularism. To put it mildly.

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"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...."

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Well, surprise, surprise. 😝

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Sep 17
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Thank you for the info! I did know about the Edgardo Mortara case, but was hazy on how that all fit into the history of France and colonialism. Here's one that my dad's side of the family used to laugh uproariously about: back 1700-ish, a Jewish accountant from Rome married the granddaughter or great-niece or something of the Duke of Savoy. On the marriage certificate (which we have a copy of), he's described as "judio di Roma." Documents from Rome are pretty easy to access, and they were mostly in Latin and pretty standardized, but similar documents from Savoy (then a more-or-less independent duchy) are in about four languages/regional dialects and are much more challenging. Anyway, this Jewish accountant had a last name that harked back to al-Andalus (Arab Spain), and the same family name is all over north Africa, Spain, and Latin America, though spelled and pronounced differently. He likely had to convert to catholicism to marry. Fast forward to 1939. My dad is living in LA with his French-speaking immigrant grandmother, and she teaches him to make some unusual dishes, and introduces him to the celebration of Passover a la Sephardim. So that long-ago ancestor, from what dad and I were able to discover brought some of his most cherished traditions (mostly food) into that mixed marriage in Savoy--and those traditions had been passed down in my dad's family for 200+ years, out of context, to be sure, but still there. Oh, and that Duke of Savoy who ok'd the marriage of his great niece/granddaughter with that Jewish boy? *His* descendant was the only person that the various warring parties at the end of the Italian wars of unification could agree on to occupy the power seat: William, Duke of Savoy. Willliam had stayed out of those wars, not sending money, troops, or even diplomatic support to anybody. Which he could afford to do because Savoy was pretty far away and was more or less independent. So that is how Sephardic food in my family's makeshift sort-of-passover celebrations shares a link to the overthrow of the Italian monarchy by Mussolini's fascists, the year after my dad's birth. Funny how family stories converge sometimes.

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The Founding Fathers were a bunch of Heathens from a protestant country so doomed to Hell anyway.

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So we're in good company! 👍

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Fuck it. Posting it while he is busy 😁

https://youtu.be/B9FzVhw8_bY?si=cumV5mir_SHI-Ga-

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Dilemma. Posting it or not before NOGODZ arrive ? 🤔

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They're pining for the days when they 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 the dictators; hanging out with today's tyrants makes them all wistful and nostalgic.

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They’re pining for the medieval days when they had more power than actual kings!

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There is a quote that I cannot recall exactly, but it suggests organized religions such as Catholicism get along with dictatorship, better than it does with democracy because their interests coincide.

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Dianne, and to call Harris one of the lesser of two evils!! Talk about evil! The Catholic church & religion in general!

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Dianne, I did not even know about this and I know what WE have done throughout central, south America & Iran & many more small nations. Add this to it and we must stop privileging religion! To be honest, I think we’re mostly on track to make it irrelevant within 10-20 years. Government must STOP subsidizing religion with tax breaks!

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Sigh. I know, because I lived it--or, friends of mine did and I heard about it from them. I guess we elders are of some use sometimes. But, no, none of the stuff about Argentina (or the rest of Latin America) was a secret at the time. The information might have been heavily suppressed in the US, but it wasn't hard to find if you bothered to look. Ditto Iran: one of my roommates back in the day was Iranian, and I was invited to many student activities sponsored by the Iranian student group on campus. Ditto Arab students. It just reminds me of something the journalist Robert Fisk said in one of his books or articles: that Americans are the most propagandized people in the world, and they don't even know it. Fisk had traveled to countries all over the world, including those most demonized by the US, and reported regularly from those places. He referred to coming to the US as "arriving in the Twilight Zone". We are brought up from Day One to believe the propaganda. Few, if any, people have regular access to other sources of information or are motivated to seek out people from other countries who see the world differently. That's one reason it's such a shock to most US people to even encounter those different--and regularly demonized--perspectives. It takes a helluva a lot of time to, umm, self-deprogram, just as it takes a helluva lot of time and energy to deprogram from being catholic. I've been doing the latter since I was about eleven or twelve (1963, or thereabouts), and having been lied to and indoctrinated and propagandized for all those decades still pisses me off. In my book, the liars don't get any slack or sympathy. None.

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As it comes to the issue of evil, how about an organization that at least attempts to exercise excessive and coercive control over its membership, promotes dogma, doctrines, and ideologies which treat those who believe as figurative "sheep," and push a belief system which has no basis in actual reality. That evil to us is self-evident, yet most of them can't see the forest for all those pesky trees.

Oh, and considering the topic of abortion, just WHO is the biggest abortionist of all time, Frankie? That would be your buddy, Yahweh, who has exterminated more blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses than all the safely and legally done procedures ever performed. That's yet another fact the Vatican hasn't the cojones to admit to. The blunt fact is that Frankie and his side-boys are IRRELEVANT, and no one with a working brain should pay him any mind.

I'd like to think the day is coming when no one will.

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And how many of those were women who desperately wanted a child? Not unwilling hosts.

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Pre-CISE-ly!

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It's okay if gawd does it. 🙄

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So what would we call a political party that is against any abortions but expects people to simply die if they don't have the money to pay for medical care? Many abortions happen because the fetus is deformed to the point that the baby will not live long after birth. Heroic life saving methods are often expensive and not covered by insurance. Insurance that may be opposed by the Republican party because it's 'socialist'. Sometimes that baby can live for a few years. Making them comfortable is all we can do but Republicans are against that unless you have money. Because even if you have insurance for your disabled kid, it may not cover enough. Denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, which could be defined as a condition from birth is part of what Republicans say they want.

No, Republicans have shown that they are NOT pro-life, they are pro-rich. They have simply found a way to rile up a good portion of the people in the US who refuse to think for themselves.

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not to mention if the poor things do live, they are a full 24/7 lifetime job.

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His deity could have banned slavery, instead it banned pork. 🤔

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AND banned shrimp, lobster, scallops, et cetera. He COULD have taught people how to cook pork and seafood properly ... but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! 😝

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Not that they actually care that those are banned. Not with the way they keep shoveling them into their mouths.

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The only abomination that matters is gay sex. The rest not even really guidelines.

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I shovel shellfish into my mouth every chance I get.

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Oh! Good one! 👍🏼

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When the pope has a wife that’s in pregnancy distress or is pregnant himself, then maybe he’ll sing a different tune. Until then, I just hear a bunch of bad lyrics in a song that’s completely off-key.

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They're like Republicans. Until something impacts them DIRECTLY, they simply do not care.

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Even then they won’t. They would handle it discreetly, threaten everyone who noticed anything and just carry on with their bigotry. Because the biggest sin is bringing their deeds to the public, this sin is much bigger than anything else.

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How can an altar boy get pregnant when it's his mouth that's being inseminated? Where is THAT in the Bible??

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Pendant que j'y suis. I pinched my nose but I voted for the candidate who was willing to enshrine abortion rights in my country constitution and able to win against marine lapeine.

I am deeply sorry for the American cis women and transmen who are suffering right now but it wouldn't have been possible without 6 injustices from your fucked up sc.

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F*ck MEDICAL APARTHEID imposed by old ass washed up nasty white men. Not interested bitches. I remember how they conjured it up in the first place: To murder pregnant Black women AND the child in their womb cuz they were pissed MLK checked their peasant asses.

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It is simply a feeble attempt to retain a false belief in male moral superiority fostered by an obsolete religion with a well meaning old man at its head expressing a false equivalency. What else is new?

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The fact is that Catholics are leaving the church. Evangelicals are leaving their churches. More and more people are simply abandoning something that, ultimately, has not, does not, and will not effectively serve them or have any relevance to their lives.

Meanwhile, the nones are growing in number and that growth thus far has not abated. Funny thing, that.

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Notice that Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists never bother the Catholic church? It's not by chance, methinks.

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These false equivalences are another cop out for Republicons and evangelicals when the “facts” don’t line up for them.

Remember “live and let live?” How about “mind your own business?”

If you hate abortion, don’t have one!

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Yes. And so many of the clinic "protestors" are wrinkled old men, or post-menopausal women who couldn't push out a baby if they tried.

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I have been seeing a shitload of memes and comments from… celebrities, that are saying not to take political advice from celebrities after Swift made her statement. And the one going around is talking about why take advice from a woman whose songs are 90% about picking the wrong guy. Which is completely ridiculous. She does have songs about breakups, but they’re not 90% of her music. And the point of dating is to weed through the wrong to find the right, so as to not make a mistake with the forever person. The fact that she hasn’t chosen a forever person says that she is properly discerning. Plus, she chose the woman. Which you could argue means that she was able to avoid the wrong guy. And that all guys are wrong (jk, I kid I kid).

I find it funny that these same folks warning about intelligent people not looking to celebrities for voting advice are saying this after Swift corrects some misinformation about herself but not about Hulk Hogan endorsing Trump, or Kid Rock skimping for him, or any of the rightwing celebrities shoving their heads up Trump’s ass. Hell, they didn’t give a fuck about Trump’s attempt to claim her endorsement a month ago through AI.

And finally, her endorsement was not necessarily her trying to interfere in the election. No celebrity endorsement was ever considered that before, why is it for her and her alone? But also consider that everyone has been talking about it since the Eras tour started, who will she vote for? Biden or Trump, then Harris or Trump, will she go Green or Independent? The media has been banging on about her vote for over a year, at least. They’ve been sifting through all sorts of quotes and images to try to find her message of support. There was that concert pick that everyone thought had a silhouette of Harris in it, is it Harris or just a backup dancer. She’s been holding back. It took Trump lying about her support and a debate to get her to go public. Everyone else has put this on her to decide and now that she has, they’re upset she picked one. Tells you more about who the media is pulling for than what she is doing to the election.

It’s easy for Swift to be more morally sound than the Pope, aside from a few notable exceptions, everyone is more morally sound than the Pope.

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I suspect some of it is the fact she's a woman. The fact that she is a very influential woman among women (and not a few gay men) in the 18-30 age group. She might actually change the minds of young voters who weren't going to vote, or would just vote as their parents have always done without really thinking about it.

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The 900 pound gorilla has sat down.. And done it with class.

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There is an idiom in U.S. culture to call someone with a lot of influence in a lopsided confrontation an 800 lb. gorilla (as such an opponent would be a sure winner in a confrontation with a normal human). 900 (figurative) lbs of powerful woman has sat on Trump.

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First of all, why give one single damn what the pope says!? As if he is an authority. An old man isolated in the land of make-believe. Once again, the incompetent press decides he’s of importance. I don’t.

This same church stood by while a multitude of young people, mostly boys were sexually assaulted! ENOUGH!

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If there has ever been a blight on humanity as a whole, that blight is the Roman Catholic Church.

I realize that the RCC likes it when people are miserable, because miserable people are easy to manipulate. I get that this is yet another of those times when the RCC is doing its best to be sure it has people willing to follow its insane and harmful policies in the future. This is a 'church' that is far more interested in temporal power than it is in saving souls or people, and has been for centuries now.

That said, I suspect part of the reason the RCC is so hard line on the abortion issue is simply they've been using women - mothers, wives, grandmothers, etc. - to keep the Catholic laity in line for most of the church's existence. Controlling women has, traditionally, provided a way of controlling the rest of the home as well; as my father pointed out several times "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." This makes keeping women in line critical to controlling the community at large. The RCC has gotten depressingly good at it, and one of those tools is forbidding abortion in all cases.

The RCC isn't interested in helping humanity be better people. They certainly don't care about the suffering of the individual, unless said individual will be making a sizeable donation in the near future. Too many otherwise decent people have been deceived by this selfish, greedy organization down through the years, and it's still happening entirely too often. Get well soon, humanity.

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All they’re interested in is their hoarded money.

Everything else is secondary, if even that.

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