Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The anti-pedophile coloring book

If it's Wednesday, it must be Morford, and today we get a twofer. Today's column is about sex rehab. Here's a taste:

Like licking? Favor fantasy? Stoked about stroking? Unable to resist turning, staring and drooling like a whimpering dog/feral cat whenever something callipygian and curvy or firm and sinewy walks by and winks in your general direction, and then invites you to forget your marriage vows for a few days and come identify every bone in the naked human hardbody with your tongue in a giant vulva-shaped bathtub at the MGM Grand with someone named Brandi or Rocco or "Mistress Midori"?

Sailor, have we got the latest trend for you.

Come join Jesse James, Tiger Woods, David Duchovny and many more slut-tastic humans you've never really given a damn about and only recognize because of the endless tabloid headlines assaulting your eyeballs lo these past many months, in the latest spurious rehab trend to hit your internal bulls--t detector since the Catholic Church said it would "look into" the problem of all those priests molesting thousands of children and then lying about it for the past 2,000 years.

In light of the recent exposure of the bloody papists' 2000-year-old pedophilic tradition and the cover-up that goes all the way to the top, this line caught my eye:

...the Catholic Church's heartwarming coloring books that instruct young boys to always be near an open door or another adult when a priest is nearby...

Which led to a column from a coupla years ago.

Take the Archdiocese of New York. It has apparently just released new coloring book for kids, all about how to be safe in an age of fear and predation. It is full of nice pictures of kids being sweet and virginal and right, engaging in happy activities that praise Almighty God while protecting themselves from, say, online predators and vegans and atheists. It is about awareness, about listening to your parents and saying your prayers and never, ever being alone with a priest and being nice to animals and never hitting your sister and ...

Wait, what? What was that, about the priests? Oh right. Um, the pedophilia. The sexual molestation and the lawsuits and the hints of deep ongoing perversion for the past, oh, 2,000 years. Yes.

(Of course, to really make amends they'd have to fire pope Benedict XVI and hold a Vatican III conference and abolish the silly celibacy law and the abhorrent "no female priests" law and also the homophobia law and the "sex is bad for you" law and, well, pretty much all the laws restricting spirit and sex and gender and love. But, you know, that might be asking a bit much. So instead: Coloring book. Yep, that oughtta do it).

Then he shifts gears:

But it does bring up a rather fascinating question: Is the very existence of this weird little book another odd but undeniable sign (there are many others) that something a bit more spiritually rich, more karmically grand is at hand? A raised awareness? A deeper spiritual awakening? Is this the church essentially telegraphing its own imminent demise? Maybe a little?

It's a slightly mushy notion I carry over to the bizarre parallel universe of conservative Christian megachurches, those giant ultra-bland heavily shellacked stadium-sized fluorescent nightmare warehouses that are still flourishing, more or less, simply because many of them are now dramatically diluting the fire-and-brimstone religion stuff, muting all that thorny theology and eschatology and even the right-wing intolerance (or rather, carefully burying it, to be fed to you slowly, bit by bit, especially around election time) and replacing it with something resembling, well, a giant, cheesy self-help seminar.

More. Links. Enjoy.

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