"Tragic and misguided" indeed

Associated Press: Catholics Attack NYC's Free Condoms

NEW YORK - New York's top Catholic leaders on Thursday sharply criticized the city for "blanketing our neighborhoods with condoms," saying city officials were promoting promiscuity and degrading society by distributing subway-themed condoms.

The plan, the Catholic leaders said, "is tragic and misguided," adding that the only way to protect against sexually transmitted diseases is through abstinence before marriage and fidelity among married couples.

Religion has an amazing capacity for utterly disregarding any fact which it deems inconvenient. The only way to protect against STDs is through abstinence and marital fidelity? Um... no. No. No, that is simply a false statement. It's not open to debate.

We - and by "we" I refer to people with even a cursory, high-school-level knowledge of biology - have known for quite some time that sheathing a penis in latex will prevent male bodily fluids from getting out and female body fluids from getting in. No fluid transmission means no disease transmission. Quod erat demonstrandum.

And yet the Catholics talk about it as if it's a matter of opinion! It is not - it is a matter of fact, of empirical reality. Understandably, this makes Catholics nervous, because faith isn't very useful when facts and reality are involved. Faith is always employed as a vehicle to escape those things.

Catholics don't want you to have sex unless you satisfy two necessary and sufficient conditions: 1) you're married, and 2) you are copulating with the express intention to produce offspring.

This is pure stupidity. Waiting to have sex until marriage is not only a hopelessly unrealistic expectation for society at large, it is a bad starting point for any individual marriage. You really want people staying together partially because they don't know how good or bad sex would be with other people? Seems to me that the mere ignorance of something better would be a terrible foundation for a relationship.

And the Church also conveniently disregards the fact that sex is both natural and fun. It is an essential aspect of life, and it is something to indulge in, as much as eating a good meal or sleeping soundly. And no matter how much the Church may try to reduce sex to its most practical, functional role - the propagation of the species - they must admit that no one can ever have sex purely for that purpose. Sex always requires a male erection - you can't have sex without at least some desire (self-loathing as it may be). Our friend evolution made sure of that. Haha - science wins.

The Catholic Church, like so many other religions, is desperately trying to cling to its ancient heritage of superstition, willful scientific ignorance, and the reduction of women's roles in society to that of pious baby factories. But even the Church's priests sometimes realize that no one can live a full life without a little lust. Unfortunately, their minds twisted with years of repression, these priests then turn to pedaresty as their sexual outlet. Maybe they avoid women because they think condoms are a bigger evil than statutory rape.