In case you missed it ...
As if targeting the nuns wasn’t enough,
the Catholic Church is now going after the Girl Scouts.
What’s next? Denying communion to women
who use birth control?
The Girl Scouts’ alleged sin is that it
has worked with Planned Parenthood to provide fact-based information on
sexuality, puberty and reproduction.
The church, locked into a mind-set that
sees little moral difference between contraception and murder, caved to
pressure from right-wing fringe groups and decided to investigate the Girl
Scouts.
The church’s investigation has been
going on for two years. One would think that would be enough time to find out
if the scouts truly are leading young women to hell. Apparently not.
According to a Washington
Post article last week that brought national attention to the
inquisition, “In a March 28 letter to his fellow bishops, Bishop Kevin C.
Rhoades, chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth,
wrote that ‘important questions still remain and need to be examined.’”
Among the concerns noted in the Post
article: “Last year, a Colorado troop prompted complaints when it accepted a
7-year-old transgender child who was born a boy but was being raised as a girl.
Others are upset that the Girl Scouts have materials that provide links to
groups like the Sierra Club, Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, some of which
support family planning and contraception.”
In the Milwaukee area, one of the complaints centered on a Girl Scout patch
honoring Dolores Huerta — an iconic civil rights leader who, along with Cesar
Chavez, co-founded the predecessor to the United Farm Workers. Huerta’s moral
downfall? In 2007 she received an award from Planned Parenthood for “her life’s work advancing
women’s rights.”
The right-wing attack against the Girl
Scouts — with the U.S. Bishops now providing both support and cover —is led by
an obscure but tenacious group known as C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human
Rights Institute). The group was founded in 1997 to monitor the United Nations,
in particular programs that promote family planning or defend the rights of
those who do not conform to a heterosexual lifestyle. C-FAM, to put it mildly,
is a bit kooky.
The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute is a deeply
right-wing organization that sees itself as a watchdog against U.N. incursions
on our national sovereignty and against U.N. attempts to subvert American and
Catholic morality. According to its website, C-Fam’s “vision” is “the preservation
of international law by discrediting socially radical policies at the United
Nations and other international institutions.”
Back in 1633, the Church condemned
Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He was told he
must recant or be burned at the stake. It wasn’t until 1992 that the church
admitted it had erred and that Galileo was right.
The Church’s condemnation of Galileo
was part of the Church’s Inquisition into heresy — a catch-all term to describe
any view by a Catholic that does not conform to official church dogma.
Today, Planned Parenthood is the new
Galileo, contraception is a modern-day heresy, and the Church is standing firm
in its inquisition.
The current Pope, Benedict XVI, is
sometimes referred to as “God’s Rottweiler” for his work as an enforcer of
conservative doctrine while Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith —an organization within the Vatican which was once known as The
Inquisition.
Image collage by Barbara J. Miner.
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