Hilzoy Schools the Pope

Excuse me a moment while I curse out a "holy" man. I can't stand Pope Beenadick XVI, who used to be Cardinal Ratfucker, and likely has always been an insufferable ass. It seems like every few days, we're treated to a new bit of wankery, whether it be bawling people out for buying stuff, or saying that Native Americans were "silently longing"for Christianity, or saying that only the Roman Catholic Church brings hope, or yawping about how Catholics must put a stop to child abuse (without, of course, mentioning that they might best begin by, y'know, not fucking sheltering child raping priests). The man is a complete prick.

Which is why I'm so delighted that Hilzoy once again borrowed the Smack-o-Matic and schooled the Pope with it:

I see that while I was away celebrating Christmas, Pope Benedict decided, as Time put it, to take "a subtle swipe at those who might undergo sex-change operations or otherwise attempt to alter their God-given gender." Here's what he said:

"What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term "gender", results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition.

[snip]

It is not true that the natural world teaches us that marriage is between a man and a woman -- it doesn't have teachings on the subject of either human or divine institutions, and it surely does not teach us that homosexuality is unknown in nature. (The Pope is reputedly very smart and intellectually curious; did he somehow miss the stories about gay penguins, fruit flies, bonobos, and even, topically enough, black swans?) Lots of fish change sex, as did this ex-hen. There are male animals who act like females, and vice versa.

More to the point: so what? Lots of things that we find immoral are widespread in nature. Spiders eat their mates, for instance, but that doesn't imply that it's OK for us. Lots of things we think are just fine are unknown in animals -- number theory, for instance, or blogging. If you want to argue about what we learn when we "listen to the language of creation", you need to explain how we distinguish it from, say, the language of prejudice. Does the fact that the purpose of eating seems to be nourishment imply that it is immoral to drink diet soda? Does the fact that we 'naturally' get around using our legs imply that we were wrong to invent the bicycle, or, for that matter, the wheelchair? Does the fact that we are born vulnerable to a whole host of diseases mean that we should not develop vaccines and cures?

Personally, I think that the idea of defining what's "natural" for human beings is generally confused. What's natural is often contrasted to what's cultural, but human beings are social animals. If anything is natural for human beings, it is being raised by other human beings, and learning things from them: if we tried to find out what's 'natural' for human beings by dropping an infant into an unpopulated wilderness, we'd have to conclude that what comes naturally to us is starvation.

I stand in awe.