… Jesus loves you more than you will know. And that’s absolutely fine by me, if that’s what you want to believe!

A very good (and very long-standing) friend challenged me this week as to why I spend so much time having a go at the religious, so here goes …

Firstly, darling, I don’t actually spend all that long doing it. It’s only rarely that I go into serious print on the subject, mostly it’s just a one-liner and a link to a story.

Secondly, my fire is not aimed at all those of a religious bent. For fairly obvious reasons I’m well aware that the majority of religious people are well-intentioned and only want to live their lives in peace.

Thirdly, I have absolutely no problem with personal belief in god(s). I fully support what it says in Article 9 of the Rome Convention, namely that everyone has a right to believe as they wish and to peacefully profess those beliefs. However, that is as far as I will go and if your religion makes you spew intolerance, hatred or bigotry then don’t expect me to sit quietly and let it go unchallenged.

We are all familiar with the antics of the late Fred Phelps and the egregious Westboro Baptist Church, who picket funerals in their prurient, and almost onanistic, campaign to be be truly vile about homosexuals. They are, sadly, very far from being alone. The latest in the long line of “loving” christians to tell me that I shouldn’t be soiling god’s clean earth with my filth is “Pastor” Logan Robertson of the Westcity Bible Baptist Church who says I should be killed for being gay. (He doesn’t have the guts to actually do it himself – he expects the government to do it for him!) Not even the roman catholic church still goes quite that far, but it does call me “objectively disordered”. Well, if you put this shit out there, don’t expect me not to react!

I am what I am and I refuse to be made to feel guilty about it by ignorant, loud-mouthed, boggle-eyed bible bashers or celibate geriatrics in frocks who preside over an oppressive organisation reeking of its own hypocrisy, filth and corruption.

But there is a more important reason for getting exercised over this muck. The peddlers of hate are saying that I am worth less because of what I am. They seek to make me less than human. They claim to be speaking on behalf of their god, and they think this gives them carte blanche to say unacceptable, outrageous and hurtful things.

This dehumanisation starts with simple name-calling – left unchecked it continues into the concept that the chosen target doesn’t deserve to live – and it ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Killing Fields of Cambodia or any other of man’s genocidal rampages.

All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. I can’t do much, but I cannot and will not remain silent. When they stop their vilification, their insults and their threats, THEN I will leave them in peace.

Tomorrow is my birthday – I’ll be fifty-six. As the years go by and I see more and more both of how nice and how dismally horrible the human race can be I think nothing can shock me anymore.

And then something like this comes along.

This is what I believe our American cousins call an intervention. It’s a recording made by a man named Daniel Ashley Pierce of a confrontation with his family. He is gay, they call themselves christian.

Granted this is in Georgia, slap bang in the middle of the bible belt, but it is still shocking that those who purport to hold true to the standards of Jesus Christ can so easily be so irrationally intolerant and downright fucking nasty to a family member on the basis of an innate characteristic about which their claimed saviour said the square root of fuck all.

Daniel was kicked out of home with nothing. He is currently being cared for by more tolerant relatives and his boyfriend.

But – all hail the internetz! A gofundme page was set up with the hope of raising $2,000 to help Daniel find somewhere to live. At the time of writing the total raised is nearly $63,000 – more than thirty times the target – and a fitting response to the hate his family has displayed.

Who’s next?

Ah, yes! Tinuola Adeyemi. “Who is she?” I hear you cry.

Tinuola is from Thamesmead and she has started a new branch of The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in, of all places, Sevenoaks. She held the inaugural service last Sunday.

Tinuola thinks that being gay is a choice.

‘I do believe homosexuality is a choice,’ she said.

‘With certain choices we create problems for ourselves and for others. Intelligent people listen to new information and can change their minds and beliefs – they can be persuaded. It’s entirely between the homosexual person and God – the Lord may want you to change certain things.’

Fascinating stuff – albeit that it’s complete bollocks. You can no more choose your sexuality than you can your skin colour. And I’d invite the preacher lady to try both before she comes out with such claptrap again.

Despite her extensive leafleting campaign, however, nobody turned up. It seems as if Sevenoaks – that hotbed of homosex and sink of sexual depravity – wasn’t ready to receive the Gospel according to Tinuola.

Well played, Kent!

The saying goes that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But there are a select few people who have inhabited this planet of whom it is difficult to find nice things to say. One of those died today.

Regular readers will know that I have, many times, been highly critical of the odious Fred Phelps and his gang of reprehensible Reichsjugend, aka the Westboro Baptist Church. Rightly so – they are a bunch of unfeeling, uncaring god-botherers with a farcically twisted view of the bible.

Fred used to be a lawyer, with a record of fighting civil rights cases, (See? There is something nice to be said!) but something snapped in his head and he shagged up his career and turned into a bitter and extreme homophobe. (A former church member has expressed the opinion that this might be because Fred was a Friend of Dorothy himself.)

Now, I couldn’t really give a rat’s arse what they believe – all religions are waffle as far as I’m concerned – but Fred took to taking his little bunch of shitbags out to picket funerals, and of all the possible shitty ways of getting a shitty point across that HAS to be the shittiest.

What is saddest of all is that all that effort – all those signs made, all those thousands of miles travelled, all that money spent – has achieved precisely two fifths of five eighths of fuck all. Nobody outside the church takes them or anything they have to say seriously.

There is a benefit which comes from the efforts of others – thousands of dollars have been raised for charities by counter-protestors and whole communities have come together to shield grieving families. In the end, though, Fred’s has been a wasted life, sacrificed on his own altar of bigotry.

I would not blame anyone for wanting to give the family a well deserved dose of their own callous medicine.

Personally, I will settle for a snifter and the thought that the world is just that bit nicer this evening.

I’m working myself up into a ferment of disgruntlement with the damned catholics again! Watch this space …

As a little taster, however, consider this:-

The catholic church is getting ready to select a new leader. This will be done by a conclave of celibate, rather elderly men in frocks – the princes of the church. Will this be a fair test of the will of the membership of that church?

No – and on two grounds.

First is that the catholic church’s leadership has for decades (probably centuries) shown itself to be completely divorced from its membership. You only have to look at how many catholic women take the pill to “regulate the menstrual cycle”! Catholics of the real world and catholics of the vatican are distinct and separate branches of evolution.

Secondly, the election will not be a numerically fair representation of the church. They estimate that there are 277 million catholics in Europe and 483 million in Latin America. Europe, however, has 62 cardinals while Latin America has a mere 19. Even in Europe the figures are biased as 21 cardinals are Italian.

Despite the fact that any baptised MAN may become pope, the senile boys club will no doubt elect one of its own bigoted reactionaries to wear the red slippers.

PS – Given the retiring pope’s views on homosexuality perhaps his last act should be to click them together three times. He’d be quite at home in Kansas with Fred.

I think I just get done with excoriating the Catholic Church for its offensive stupidity and then they go and do it again. This time it’s some little squit from the Scottish Catholic Media Office, Peter Kearney.

On Radio 5 this week he said “We would believe that same-sex relationships are profoundly harmful both physically, biologically, mentally, emotionally and I have to say spiritually to those involved. No society should facilitate or encourage anyone to enter into a same-sex relationship.”

The host of the show, Dominic Laurie, interrupted him to say that gay people might find that objectionable. (He was right!) Kearney continued “I would hope they wouldn’t find it any more objectionable than someone with an alcohol problem being told ‘You’re likely to reduce your life expectancy’.

“Well, maybe they would, I don’t know. But the reality is that’s not my evidence, I haven’t made that up. That’s a matter of fact.

“The behaviour involved [in] same-sex practice is profoundly hazardous and harmful to the well-being of those involved. Now society can turn a blind eye to that and say ‘Look, who cares? Let’s take a laissez-faire attitude and let them get on with it’ and generally speaking, in our self-obsessed have-it-all society, that is the attitude we take.

“But the Church can’t take that attitude, we have to look at what’s best for the individual, whether it be someone who has an addiction to drugs, tranquilisers, alcohol, whatever, or same-sex behaviour and say ‘That’s not what’s best for you’.”

My initial reaction to this  ill-informed, insensitive, puerile tripe contained so many profanities that I would let myself put it on my own website.

How DARE they liken homosexuality to drug or alcohol addiction?

How DARE they say that my relationship is harmful?

How DARE they, with their history, seek to take the moral high ground?

This is a church that has waged war;

• that has practised anti-Semitism;
• that gave the world the terror of the Inquisition;
• that didn’t ban the use of castrati until the last century;
• that only got round to a categorical condemnation of slavery in 1965;
• that actively spreads the lie, in pursuance of its own dogma, that the use of condoms increases the risk of contracting AIDS.
• that has protected and shielded the rapists of children and has had to be dragged by the Court of Public Opinion, kicking and screaming all the way, to the point of a grudging apology. How many more years and blighted lives before all the puss is drained from that festering boil.

What is clear is that the Catholic Church has lost the argument on marriage equality and has now taken the gloves off. I would have more respect for them if they just came out of the closet and admitted openly that they don’t like gay people. At least that would be an honest stance.

The modern Catholic Church is a cess-pit of hypocrisy, spouting the stultified dogma of an oligarchy of celibate, geriatric cross-dressers still piqued that they were ousted from the governance of this country more than four centuries ago.

As a child I remember that on Saturdays and market days an old man used to tramp around the town centre wearing an A-board predicting the end. The end of what we never quite found out. We were always too busy queuing at the vegetable counter in Woolworths. (How bloody old am I ???)

I was going to spend this evening looking up evidence of a similar prediction by another sad and deluded individual – Shirley Phelps-Roper.

For those who don’t know of her she is the daughter and chief cheerleader of Fred Phelps, Pastor of Westboro Baptist Church, sociopath and self appointed moral guardian of the world. It’s also worth mentioning that he’s a disbarred lawyer, a convicted criminal and an alleged wife and child beater.

The Fred and Shirley show involves showing up at the funerals of dead American servicemen and claiming that they perished as a direct result of god’s wrath for tolerating homosexuality. Absolute bloody howash, I know, as the god of Pastor Phelps is not one that the overwhelming majority of practicing Christians would recognise. He’s certainly not one to be worshipped!

Anyway and as it happens, a former member of the cult has saved me a shedload of work. Shirley’s brother Nathan left the church on his 18th birthday. Yesterday the Huffington Post published an article by him. Clicky.

It turns out that on Obama’s inauguration day Shirl adamantly stated that he was the Beast and that he would last 42 months. What’s so significant about that? Well – time’s up tomorrow!

Sorry, Nathan, but I’m not about to sell the house, send you the proceeds and run off to a hilltop to enjoy the rapture. I think we’ll probably have a curry with the in-laws instead. And Monday morning it’ll be back to work – well, not for me, I’m on leave, but you get how seriously I’m taking this dire load of bullshit.

The only downer is that, if Fred is right (and that’s a great big bastard HUGE “if”), and I’m going to hell (as all we gayers are), then alphabetically we’re going to be rather too close to the fornicators. Eternity within shouting distance Shirley really would be hell.