It seems as though the Vatican is unable to mind their own damn business, as they’ve recently opposed a piece of legislation in the UK commonly known as the “Equity Bill”. The Bill itself seems to focus on trying to tackle discrimination in workplaces, for anything ranging from age, race, gender, and (more importantly for the church) sexual orientation.

Now the Pope may be an evil scumbag, but he’s no fool; the wording he’s used to condemn this has been carefully crafted to make it look like they are only trying to defend the rights of Catholics. They say they are worried the Government would force them to employ women as priests, or worse, force their adoption agencies to allow homosexuals to have children (oh no! We can’t send them these kids to a loving home!). It’s not surprising, however, that their rhetoric doesn’t usually make any sense once you begin to scrutinize it:

“Yet, as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.

“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

But there is a misunderstanding: sometimes in government legislation equality seems to mean that we are all absolutely equal, which we are not. We are equal in dignity.

What the fuck does that mean exactly? Does it mean we can deny some people the same basic rights as others with our heads held high? What is dignity if it plays no role in deciding how fairly and equitably we treat our fellow human beings? This is the problem with religious folks who believe in an ancient and out of date dogma; in their eyes, homosexuals and women are not on par with men, and any laws which grants these folks the same rights as heterosexual males is seen as abhorrent.

In the next few days the Catholic bishops of England and Wales will issue a further challenge to Mr Brown and the other political parties in a “religious manifesto”, or pre-election document, that will build on more than a century of Catholic social thought to argue for religious freedom, as well as care for the poor and deprived.

This is the new way the church tries to spin their obvious homophobia and misogyny; they mask it under the rhetoric of helping the poor and deprived, but ignore their basic supposition, which is that homosexuals and women don’t deserve the same rights as others. That’s it. They can write a whole manifesto tooting their own horn, but it doesn’t change the fact they have no fucking business telling a foreign nation what laws it should or should not pass. Stick to talking to your invisible friend in the sky, and leave the rest of us alone, thanks.

(props to Simon for the find)