Every Sperm is Sacred

The Holiest of the Holies, Pope Benedict XVI, or Joseph Ratzinger, or Joe as I prefer to call him has been edict-ing again today in his papal infallible way.

Apparently, and he must be right, what with him being infallible and all, apparently condoms are bad for you and can exacerbate the likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS. Chutzpah eh! Well, what he said technically was that throwing money and condoms at the problem was not the answer. The only answer was to take the church's traditional stance of abstention from sexual intercourse. Of course, what better way to kill off AIDS than to stop shagging. It's the perfect solution. I'd like to hear his solution for the problem of global poverty - probably something along the lines of stop being poor and become better off. Or he could solve the Islamic terrorism problem by stating "stop being Muslims and be Catholics". Simple solutions for a simple world from a simple man. In theory obviously abstinence would work but let's not forget the old saying "Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder". If people really abstained for any length of time, you can guarantee that they would be rutting before the week was out, on a never before seen level. Abstinence as a solution could only come from a guy who killed his sexual urges or had them killed before he was out of lederhosen (by which time he was already in the seminary, where the only sex is... well let's not go into that).

What his papal plan overlooks, other than the glaringly obscene suggestion that condoms increase the likelihood of causing AIDS infection, is the fact that you cannot impose cultural ideals on other cultures. It's a bit like Robbie Williams being inexplicably successful in the UK but seen as god-awful in the USA. What works for one culture, cannot be guaranteed to work for another; especially when the culture that brought about this particular plan was an austere, medieval European society, based in piety. It's a miracle that such an anachronistic teaching could survive in any form in Europe today. It's another thing altogether to expect that such a teaching could be accepted amongst a completely different culture.

If Joe's idea of abstention is successful in any way, it is only through people's greater fear of eternal damnation than of AIDS.

If it isn't and people go ahead and do what comes naturally to them (and let's face it, if we were created, we were created with sexual desires, so what God could justifiably expect us to suppress them), I just hope they also ignore the Catholic Church's stance on contraception. Some countries in Africa have HIV/AIDS rates of around 25%, which should make you gasp in horror. With rates as high as that, African people can't afford to listen to the Papal Bullshit that emanates from his holiness and it is immoral that people should be bullied and compromised by religion when their lives are at stake.

God, I hate the irrelevant old fucker!*



(* that wasn't addressed at God, because he doesn't exist, it was just a figure of speech)