Keep on ranting cardinal

Over the weekend it seems that someone has poked one of those funny little men who wear a dress and a silly hat who believe in an invisible sky pixie. This one is called Cardinal Keith O'Brien who has got his thurible in a twist over of course the one thing above everything else that seems to get the religidiots riled and that's bottysex.

Apparently letting people get married who happen to have the same configuration of junk between their legs is a "grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right". OK well let's just set aside the fact you are a high-up in an organization that seems to exists solely to facilitate its staff members' sexual abuse of minors and pick the bones out of that sentence you regurgitated.

Universal
Human
Right

Yep, a universal right for all humans. If you like someone and they like you and the pair of you want to commit to each other you can do this thing where you stand up and say a few words and get a bit of paper with your names on it. We call it "Marriage". Nowhere does this "universal human right' mention anything about your reproductive plumbing. 

Honestly of the guy had any sense at all he's just shut the fuck up as all he's done is make himself look a complete foaming-at-the-mouth religious extremist in a Taliban stylee,  and if anyone was wavering on the "gay Marriage good thing / bad thing" fence they certainly won't want to be associated with you.

So keep on ranting cardinal because you're doing the cause of marriage equality a metric fuckton of favours. Plus, when you get found out shagging rent-boys, it makes it way more amusing for the rest of us if we can tag 'hypocrisy' onto your list of personal failings.

Church of England "Threatens" on porn.. oh noes!

I think being "threatened" by the C of E must be like being savaged by a half dead chinchilla; bizarre, not dangerous and you just end up feeling sorry for the chinchilla.

So what are the men who go around wearing frocks getting all hot under the dog-collar about today? Well if that bastion of accurate and unbaised reportage the Daily Fail is to believed "War on web sleaze: Church of England threatening to withdraw millions invested in ISPs over rise of internet porn. OK so you have "invested" these "millions" how exactly? That would be largely through shares sold in the open market I would expect, so you sell your holding and lose all that lovely dividend income, depress the share price which provides a buying opportunity to other investors who purchase these shares and raise the price. Your net contribution to "stemming the tide of these sick and depraved images" is the square root of fuck all.

Look, we have had porn forever, and "extreme" porn at that; there is a cave painting in southern France that is tens of thousands of years old, well before any form of civilisation existed, it depicts a crude stick figure of a human shagging some kind of animal. Porn isn't going to go away despite what you think your sky fairy would want. Rather amusingly and sticking with animals for a moment the much heralded "Extreme Porn" laws introduced last year get a mention along with the fact that hardly anyone has been proscecuted under these laws; well that's for a reason, it's nigh on impossible, with the exception of bestiality, to mount a case as to what is "grossly offensive... and realistic" (and you only get bestiality under the wire because it's pretty obvious its an animal and not a human) so all the cases have been for possession of bestiality images, and even there one case got dropped as the video clip in question was a CGI render (and cartoons don't count - so all you Furry and My Little Pony rule 34 fans are in the clear).

Of course the reason why this has all come to the surface is the recent Vincent Tabak conviction for murder where it transpires he'd been looking at "violent porn". The usual suspects in the Daily Wail and elsewhere start their knee jerk "It was the porn what made him do it" blissfully ignoring the fact that presumably these websites were not solely set up just for Vince and therefore tens if not hundreds of thousands probably paid these left handed mousing sites a visit and then didn't go on to strangle their neighbor. If you're the sort of person who would take someone's life I would posit that you're that kind of person and watching some S&M porn isn't going to make a blind bit of difference if you are going to act on your impulses - in fact I would say and the studies bear out that having a safety valve of knocking one out over some staged smut might just act as a safety valve*

The bishops might want to consider that before they sell their ISP shares and buy cassock futures and tofu bonds.


* incidences of sexual assault have decreased in countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands after the legalisation of porn.