Ohhh, those wacky popetastic Catholics!

So there's just a buffet line of choices for what to bitch about in tonight's entry. Even though Bush appeared on national TV night trying to convince everyone that his ridiculous grudge match in Iraq is worth the thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, I think I'll actually spare him this time. Tonight, I'm going to vent my spleen on the Catholic Church.

Disclaimer/Caveat: If anyone reading this is a devout Catholic and is brainwashed enough to still hold their church in high regard, I can say only this: You're gonna be offended, I just know it. You'll get your little Catholic panties in a twist and you'll clutch your silly damned little Rosary beads so tightly, they'll break into pieces. So just do yourself a favor and stop reading now.

For the rest of you, carry on.

Let's put aside for the moment the general oppressiveness and weirdness of the Roman Catholic church. You know, the holy water, the worshipping of Mary, the confessing to a priest instead of directly to God, the little odd statues they scatter all over the place, the air of idolatry surrounding their rituals... Let's also put aside their silent endorsement of the slave trade back in the day, or their despicable platform of noninvolvement during the Holocaust. We won't even discuss the ridiculous big hats their cardinals and popes wear.

No, we're going to concentrate on their latest statement of almost jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Apparently, Canada's House of Commons today passed legislation to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. The legislation is widely expected to breeze through the Senate and become federal law in Canada by the end of July.

Needless to say, the Catholic Church is having themselves a right old hissy fit over it. They essentially denounced the legislation, saying that this new law would, in particular, harm children.

I had to read that twice when I saw it in the story and I still had trouble believing it. First, it's just ridiculous to think that legalizing gay marriage would actually harm children. If you counted up the 10 most infamously deranged human beings in the last century, you'd find that they all came from traditional heterosexually married couples. Besides, same-sex marriage is quite illegal in the U.S., and I'd hardly say that keeps our children free from harm. But second, the big joke to me is that the Catholic Church would have the temerity to ever play the "it's for the children" card again. This is the church that knowingly and willfully covered up countless child molestations and rapes at the hands of its priests, and protected the priests they knew to be pathological sex offenders. This is the church that has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in damage claims as a result of their clergy having sex with their choir boys. I find it incredibly offensive that the Catholic Church would dare point fingers at anyone and say they just might "harm some children." Even if their sensationalistic claims were true, they've got absolutely no business castigating others. They quite frankly need to get their own fucking house in order before passing judgment on anyone. Go bury a plastic statue in your yard and shut the hell up, that's my take on it. (For those unfamiliar with this particular weirdness, Catholics believe that burying a statue of St. Joseph in their yard -- upside down and facing the street, no less -- will help their house sell or their property value rise or some damn thing. It's even touted by some of their dioceses. What freaks.)

All that said, one thing remains: Go Canada!!