NYT Ad: Quit The Catholic Church

CMR ^ | March 9, 2012 | Patrick Archbold

[NYer]

The New York Times published an ad from the Freedom From Religion Foundation which calls for nominal and liberal Catholics to abandon the Church.

The ad asks "Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? " and states "No self-respecting feminist, civil libertarian or progressive should cling to the Catholic faith." [Full Text Below.]

It goes without saying that the brave brave NYT would never accept and publish an ad criticizing Islam in the same way. But leaving aside the obvious cowardice and their disgraceful perfunctory anti-Catholicism, I think the ad is good. If that is what you believe, get out.



Full Text

Dear ‘Liberal’ Catholic:

It’s time to quit the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s your moment of truth. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on, anyway?

It is time to make known your dissent from the Catholic Church, in light of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ ruthless campaign endangering the right to contraception. If you’re part of the Catholic Church, you’re part of the problem.

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

A backer of the Roman Catholic presidential candidate says that if women want to avoid pregnancy we should put an aspirin between our knees? Catholic politicians are urging that the right to contraception should be left up to states? Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court upheld contraception as a privacy right, we’re going to have to defend this basic freedom all over again?

You’re better than your church. So why? Why continue to attend Mass? Tithe? Why dutifully sacrifice to send your children to parochial schools so they can be brainwashed into the next generation of myrmidons (and, potentially, become the next Church victims)? For that matter, why have you put up with an institution that won’t put up with women priests, that excludes half of humanity?

No self-respecting feminist, civil libertarian or progressive should cling to the Catholic faith. As a Cafeteria Catholic, you chuck out the stale doctrine and moldy decrees of your religion, but keep patronizing the establishment that menaces public health by serving rotten offerings. Your continuing Catholic membership, as a “liberal,” casts a veneer of respectability upon an irrational sect determined to blow out the Enlightenment and threaten liberty for women worldwide. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.

If you imagine you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you are deluding yourself. If you remain a “good Catholic,” you are doing “bad” to women’s rights. You’re kidding yourself if you think the Church is ever going to add a Doctrine of Immaculate ContraCeption.

It is disgraceful that U.S. health care reform is being held hostage to the Catholic Church’s bizarre opposition to medically prescribed contraception. No politician should jeopardize electability for failure to genuflect before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. (Question to ask your Bishop: Does he hold up an umbrella against the rain? Isn’t that just as “unnatural” as using a condom or diaphragm?)

Your Church hysterically claims that secular medical policy is “an assault against religious liberty.” You are savvy enough to realize that the real assault is by the Church against women’s rights and health care. As Nation columnist Katha Pollitt asks: Is it an offense against Jehovah Witnesses that health care coverage will include blood transfusions? The Amish, as Pollitt points out, don’t label cars “an assault on religious liberty” and try to force everyone to drive buggies. The louder the Church cries “offense against religious liberty” the harder it works to take away women’s liberty.

Obama has compromised, but the Church never budges, instead launching a vengeful modern-day Inquisition. Look at its continuing directives to parish priests to use their pulpits every Sunday to lobby you against Obama’s policy, the Church’s announcement of a major anti-contraception media campaign — using your tithes, contributions and donations — to defeat Obama’s laudable health care policy. The Church has introduced into Congress the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, ” a bill to place the conscienceless Catholic Church’s “rights of conscience” above the rights of conscience of 53 percent of Americans. That the Church has “conscience rights” to deny women their rights is a kissing cousin to the claim that “corporations are people.” The Church that hasn’t persuaded you to oppose contraception now wants to use the force of secular law to deny contraceptive rights to non-Catholics.

But is there any point in going on? After all, your misplaced loyalty has lasted through two decades of public sex scandals involving preying priests, children you may have known as victims, and church complicity, collusion and coverup going all the way to the top. Are you like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go?

But we have a more welcoming home to offer, free of incense-fogged ritual, free of what freethinker Bertrand Russell called “ideas uttered long ago by ignorant men,” free of blind obedience to an illusory religious authority. Join those of us who put humanity above dogma.

As a member of the “flock” of an avowedly antidemocratic club, isn’t it time you vote with your feet? Please, exit en Mass.

Very truly,

Annie Laurie Gaylor
Co-President
Freedom From Religion Foundation

ht Gateway Pundit

[NYer]

If the shoe fits ..... Until then, we Catholics will continue to pray for our “on the cusp” brothers and sisters.

[Thane_Banquo]

"Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club?

Anyone else find it ironic that they use the Biblically-based word antideluvian?

[haywoodwebb]

antediluvian???


LOL!

[JudgemAll]

MEanwhile PAnetta is saying the UN mandate overseas the US congress approval for war... against the USA, I suppose.

America is clueless under Obama, battling these provocation and emotional activities for women, while we are about to be invaded or attacked. They say Obama is smart, it means that liberals have given up paying attention to what Zero is doing and they are going to play stupid from here on out.

But so be it, let the liberals quit the CAtholic church and join their moslem friends where they will have no choice between nun or bikini, but only a hijab and forced to have no opportunity but be some sex or reproduction slave of Islam. Islam loves the pill for dhimmi women.

[Da Coyote]

Gee, for a moment, I thought that description was about the Kennedys and Bill Bubba Clinton.

[JudgemAll]

YEah, well, Pelosi looks like a modern day blow up doll with a hole in it, so, antedeluvian is fine by me in so far as I am not concerned about my values being washed by the deluge, quite the contrary, they are the only thing that will keep afloat.

[cripplecreek]

Think of it as cutting an anchor chain that has been dragging through the mud.

[detective]

Is there anyone who still doubts that there is a war against Christians being waged by the Obama Administration?

The Democrat Party and the MSM are viciously anti-Catholic and anti-Christian. There is an ugly and brutal struggle ahead. The people Democrats characterize as clinging to their guns and their religion are the going to be destroyed if they refuse to defend themselves.

Why do you think all sincere Christians are vilified by the MSM?

[Dragonspirit]

Do they seriously think people care more about politics than God? Not endorsing any particular denomination, but to someone who belongs to denomination X, they do so because they think denomination X best represents their proper role to God. It isn’t trivial to them, they don’t do it for the same reason they would wear a certain color or fashion or trend.

[I_Like_Spam]

I wonder if the New York Times would have been willing to print an ad encouraging people to quit the Muslim faith?

[frogjerk]

We were all "somethings" about that small.

Liberals use the same argument for killing the unborn. The Democrat party song is "Short people got no reason to live."

[JudgemAll]

IT starts against Christians and does not end there. The jealous of the vital spaces of people does not end there. They will go after Jews and more.

In fact, a cow breeder from Europe once joked to me that in Europe they do not feed hormones to their meat for eating but to their women directly to prevent reproduction and make them fat.

These people are at war with anything decent.

[PGR88]

If there are any so-called "Catholics" who are so weak in their faith that they would actually be swayed by a NY Times ad placed by the "Freedom from Religion Foundation" - we can say that they have already left, and they probably should make it official.

"So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth."

Revelation 3:16

[JudgemAll]

Non of this is truly free because it is not sustainable lifestyle, period. THis is why they are revolting and asking the government to dictate the atheist terms in the end. Atheists I know are confused and, aside from the morale giving soundbites from the Nazi media MSM sergeants, they are truly hungry for God.

[HiTech RedNeck]

As a “protestant” evangelical I view this affair from a different angle... I do not want to see anybody stop either believing in Christ (if it is possible to truly stop) or to stop living a godly life. This ad is simply crass — no serious biblical evangelical, no matter the philosophical differences with the Roman Catholic church, would give it the time of day. Not even Martin Luther would have wanted this with its negatively focused approach and advocating for nothing positive but only a miasma of liberal social gospel.

To make what I think is a fair observation, however, the Roman Catholic church invited a lot of this kind of internal agitation when it acquiesced in the way high profile schools using its name thumbed their nose at some of its most fundamental teachings. Oh sure it said that was wicked and wrong, but never yanked the schools’ permission to claim being part of the Roman Catholic big tent. If a church claims to represent the name of Jesus Christ it has some awesome responsibilities to live up to.

[JudgemAll]

Indeed, I do not know why none of them come out the closet so long not everyone is on the homosexual bandwagon, unless it is to avoid feeling bad and stupid next to a person who has more self-respect. To wit, this was Jesus’ “error”, to stand there strong and “humiliate” the weak lawyers, scribes, pharisees and sanhedrins in their hypocrisy.

[cripplecreek]

Seems to me that we’re watching events very similar to the lead up to the American revolution. Then as now, the churches became a target of tyranny because the churches were a source of resistance.

[marron]

The left continues its rather naked assault on Christianity.

This, piled on to their other usual assault on freedom in general.

The requirement that everyone, catholics included, provide contraception in their insurance plan is obviously is an assault on catholic institutions that don’t want to do that, as well as removing from insurers their right to establish their own business plan.

Why not require insurers to provide free groceries? Is the church against eating?

[NYer]

Interesting poin. Thanks for the post.