A Rant. About the Pope. Not, like I said, like I've ever been *pro* Pope.

So the Pope says gay marriage is part of an "ideology of evil". I'm having a hard time, in this particular moment, understanding how my Catholic friends can still be in communion with this man. I feel hurt and confused and baffled, by the Pope, and I don't even know why: it's not like I ever *did* have any respect for him, or look to him as any sort of spiritual leader, or agree with him and his beliefs and his church on anything whatsoever. But "evil"? Evil? I mean, I think it is possible for a person of good will and good character to come to the conclusion that gay marriage is undesirable and tragically misguided. I think that would be a *wrong* conclusion, but I can see how someone could have a set of plausible beliefs about gender and society that would lead them there - mistaken beliefs, misplaced priorities, but, you know, earnest attempts to figure things out properly. I have no idea how someone could reach the conclusion that gay marriage was *evil* in any sort of decency or honesty about the world around them. I mean, it's not like we're so short on examples of real, genuine evil that you could just forget what it looks like and think it's a sort of loving partnership. Either the Pope is totally divorced from reality (which, again, I've always believed, given the whole thinks-he-talks-to-god thing, so I don't know why I'm so appalled), or from morality. Or, heck, both. Gah.

(More on people of good character coming to profoundly flawed moral judgments: the O'ists, especially the more hardcore/"devout" O'ists, have an unpleasant tendency to refer to people and things as "evil". This really doesn't help the thing where everyone else thinks they're raving wackos. And it's just sort of ugly and base, which is ironic for people so concerned with a virtue ethic. But it doesn't infuriate me so much, which is ironic as you'd think I'd have *higher* standards for my, er, fellow non-travellers, but, well, they're wackos. Er. I guess I feel you don't have to be quite as careful with your denouncing if you're some fringe group as opposed to the spiritual leader of millions. I suppose also I do believe people who want to marry their partners to be entirely innocent and undeserving of denunciation while, while I think the O'ists go craaazy overboard in calling things evil, I do think a number of the things they target are at least deserving of some criticism. I mean, I call Jeremy Rifkin evil and he has not actually blown up a bus or anything. Maybe I should try harder to stick to calling him and his ilk "poisonous" and "toxic" and things. Hrmm.)