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Not in my name
Polly Toynbee makes an ass of herself again and reveals the teeny-tiny dimensions of her soul...

How dare Tony Blair genuflect on our behalf before the corpse of a man whose edicts killed millions?
Polly Toynbee
With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome.
Because they only talk to each other, they're surprised that the rest of the world has an entirely different thought process. As usual, when the rest of the world doesn't agree with them it's the rest of the world that's wrong...
The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its front-page headlines, "Safe in Heaven" and the next day "Amen". Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing. Poor old Prince Rainier of that squalid little tax haven missed his full Hello! death rites through bad timing.
Bad timing on his part. He should have lasted a little longer before pegging out, though I understand he wasn't a bad sort...
The arcane flummery brings forth dusty academics in Vaticanology, the Act of Settlement and laws of Monegasque succession. These pantomimes of power fascinate in their quaintness, but they signify nothing beyond momentary frisson.
I try to keep all my frissons momentary...
The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald no resurgence of Catholicism.
No, it's a reminder that the Catholicism is there, all around us, just not a spectacular phenomenon. People like Polly only notice phenomena when there's a crowd.
The devout are there, but this is essentially a Diana moment, a Queen Mother's catafalque. People queue to join great public spectacles, hoping it's a tell-my-grandchildren event. Communing with public emotion is easy now travel is cheap. These things are driven by rolling, unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.
So turn your teevee off. Read a book or go to a movie. Most of us can only take so much of the 24/7 coverage — for one thing, it repeats itself over and over. But people are interested, even if Polly's not and even if I'm only moderately interested in the mechanics of it all. The funeral's tomorrow, and they'll have elected another Pope in a week or so and then we'll all go back to 24/7 coverage of the Michael Jackson trial.
Bill Clinton had it right yesterday: "The man knows how to build a crowd."
He was referring to the Pope? I guess if you have to die of old age to build a crowd that's one way to do it. I'm not too sure why you'd want to, or what you'd do with it once you've built it, at least that way...
Curiously, the celebrity nature of this event - a must-do for 200 world leaders - signifies the opposite of what it seems. It shows how far people have forgotten what the church really is, how profoundly ignorant and indifferent they have become to history and theology. Hell, he was just a good ol' boy, wore white, blessed folk, prayed for peace - why not?
Large numbers of people consider him to have been a great and a good man, both of which are worthy of our admiration and even reverence. Our age produces few enough of both, and usually not in the same person.
In Europe church attendance is plummeting, even in Poland, the heart of reactionary Catholicism. Here the young are clueless about the most basic Christian stories. How about the DJ who opened his show with "Happy Good Friday!" Art galleries now need to explain the agony in the garden, the raising of Lazarus and even the annunciation. In surveys, half the population couldn't say what Easter meant. It is precisely this insouciant ignorance that lets people emote with the flow; they know not what they do.
I suspect people have always been much like that. I also suspect Polly's a condescending twit.
The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.
Here comes the carping...
It has weak temporal power, so George Bush can safely pray at the corpse of the man who criticised the Iraq war and capital punishment; it simply didn't matter as the Pope never made a serious issue of it or ordered the US church to take strong action.
It wasn't his job to do so, and doing so would have weakened the Church. Most of the Middle Ages was spent working out where the Pope's spiritual power ended and his temporal power began. We've moved considerably beyond the stage where the Pope claimed to be the ultimate temporal authority in the Christian world. We've moved beyond the point where doing the Bell, Book, and Candle thing is even feasible anymore. The Pope doesn't have any temporal power. He's a spiritual leader. The Papal States have been gone for 150 years. Polly's just mad because the Pope also made plain his disapproval — on spiritual grounds, we might add — of Communism and that it did collapse, in part because of that disapproval.
The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world.
Church doctrine is against using birth control. It boils down to forming an opinion on right and wrong, concepts which are slippery enough in today's world. It retains those quaint notions of sin — both venial and mortal — and penance and redemption. People who adhere to the Church's teachings on the subject of fidelity don't have much to worry about in the area of AIDS. Keeping one's pants on outside the conjugal bedroom isn't viewed as being quite the problem AIDS is. But if you're going to be in the club you should be prepared to play be all the rules, not just the ones you like.
In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia.
Or the immediate victims of Pop doinking the local hookers and bringing a little present home for Mom...
Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.
Maybe beyond Polly's comprehension. I can grasp it pretty easily.
This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not permeate. He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost.
Because Polly doesn't agree with it, it's extreme.
How dare our prime minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our approval for this?
Probably because JPII was a world leader, revered by billions, to include non-Catholics. Probably as a gesture of respect not only to JPII, but also to the world's Catholics.
Will he think of Africa when on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great Vatican crime.
I'm not sure where the sexual trivia came from. Is she referring to Michael Jackson? Am I too tired this evening to follow elementary arguments? Or is she not making any sense?
The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat Jesuitical when I argued with him in a BBC studio yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when all the church calls for is sex within marriage and abstinence.
To me that's a pretty sensible question...
But abstinence and celibacy are not the human condition.
Abstinence and celibacy were the human condition prior to the advent of the birth control pill. Our parents were much more virtuous in their youth in that respect, if only because they were always dealing with live rounds. And Polly, probably as old as I am, should be able to remember those thrilling days of yesteryear...
If the Vatican learned anything about humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches elsewhere still in denial. The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all surprising: most humans are sexual beings. A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an American priest from allegations. Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them.
She's got a few valid comments, even though they're cheap shots. Most humans are indeed sexual beings. That's why there are more of us with each generation. The fact that we're sexual doesn't mean our sexuality's beyond our control, otherwise we'd be copulating all over the place. It's a sign of civilization to control one's impulses. At the very same time, it's the people on Polly's side of the argument who're in favor of allowing homosexuals to move in on the Boy Scouts, the while pooh-poohing any argument that the presence of significant numbers of pubescent and pre-pubescent young boys — too young to have any experience in fighting off sexual predators — will draw those predators like flies.
Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial.
I've known lots of priests who were capable of self-denial. I've known lots of ministers who, though married, managed to avoid having affairs. And not only ministers; people having affairs is still, 50 years after the introduction of the pill, considered scandalous in many circles. Just ask Prince Chuck and Cam. The Church has always discouraged homosexuality. The fact that it's become fashionable in some circles doesn't change the theological assessment of whether it's a sin or not. The Church's disapproval of divorce traces back to Christ's admonishment that "what God hath joined together, let no man put assunder." And if life begins with conception, if that's when the soul comes into existence, then the Church's stance on abortion not only makes sense but is quite principled. You may agree or you may disagree, but those are their opinions. I admire the people who do keep to the rules, myself.
There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.
Readily available contraception has been a benefit to the world, in my opinion, but it's had side effects that haven't been good for society. Falling birthrates in Europe contribute to much of the tension we see here on Rantburg every day, to whit, the arrival of fresh waves of Vandals, Huns, Visigoths, Gepids and all the other beturbanned new barbarians, trampling over a civilization that's old and deeply rooted but exhausted from slaughtering its finest in the flower of their youth — and not replenishing the supply. Increased sexual activity for recreation is fun, but it also imposes strains on the family. Think on the subject long enough and you can come up with lots of other non-beneficial side effects. On balance, I think it's a good thing, especially since I was young enough to enjoy a few of the benefits in my younger and more single days, but I recognize the down side, too.
In 1971 I interviewed Mother Teresa and asked how she justified letting starving babies be born to die on Calcutta streets for lack of contraception. She said sublimely that every baby entering the world was another soul created in praise of God, even if it lived only a few hours. She was never keen on cures: suffering was a gift of God that enabled those who cared for the afflicted to demonstrate their love. She was beatified by John Paul II for their shared religious mania. Those who met them talk of an aura of love, power, listening and intensity. But goodness is in doing good; good intent is no excuse for murderous error.
The babies were there. Mother Teresa was there. But she wasn't there to hand out rubbers; she was there to comfort the halt and the infirm. She was dealing with the effects — cleaning up a part of the mess — not addressing the cause.
Today's saccharine sanctimony will try to whiten the sepulchre of yet another Pope whose obscurantist faith has caused pointless suffering; it is no defence that he was only obeying higher orders.
Sure it is. He was carrying out the will of God as he saw it, agree with him on all points or not. I'll admit, though, that Polly's Eichmann allusion was more subtle than Ward Churchill's, though just barely. There's a rational body of thought behind the Church's teachings. Just because Polly disagrees doesn't make it wrong. And I'll take the Pope over the Islamic holy men sending people out to explode any time.
At the funeral will be a convocation of mullahs, rabbis and all the other medieval faiths that increasingly conspire together against modernity.
At least Polly's catholic in her condemnation of all religions. But even us agnostics recognize the fact that the concepts of right and wrong are deeply rooted in religion, in man's attempt to decipher the will of God. Without a belief in a higher being, you're left with whatever feels right. Abortion, homosexuality, and promiscuity feel right to Polly, even though society's struggled to control them through the ages.
Islamic groups are sternly warning the Vatican to stand firm against liberal influences on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. What is it about religion that unites them all on sex?
They're all against you, Polly. You, personally.
It always expresses itself as disgust for women's bodies, leading to a need to suppress women altogether. Why is controlling women's bodies the shared battle flag of every faith?
I have a great liking for women's bodies, as do most other men. I love to look at them, love to touch them, love to do pleasant things with them. But I suspect that society began organizing itself into what would eventually become civilizations when we stopped being ground monkeys who jumped each other whenever a random female's nether regions turned color and started making rules governing how we formed our families. A big part of that rule making involves reaching agreement on not jumping each other's mates. That imposes certain obligations on the jumpees as well as on the jumpers. I also suspect that if we stop having rules about such things we're eventually going to revert to the ground monkey stage and be replaced by more fastidious giant cockroaches or something. It's not just an interpretation of Genesis that's rooted in religion, but societal norms.
Disgracefully, the European rich quietly ignore the church's outlandish teachings on contraception without rebelling on behalf of the helpless third-world poor who die for their misplaced faith.
I suspect they find Polly a twit, too. And the helpless third-world poor probably would, as well, if they'd ever heard of her.
Those "civilised" Catholics have as much blood on their hands as the Vatican they support. They are like the Bollinger Bolsheviks who defended the USSR and a murderous ideology that they could do much to change. For today, just remember what lies beneath all this magnificent display.
Polly is Maureen Dowd, without the charisma...

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk
Posted by: Fred 2005-04-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=60964