HUD needs to call them on this.The D.C. diocese backed down real fast, rather than lose all that tax money.  And Catholic Charities was originally organized as a separate entity to avoid problems with the Establishment Clause.  Funny how all of a sudden it became a “religious organization.”
The Catholic hierarchy makes me want to heave.

Teh gays! Teh gays!The church is trying so hard to change the focus to the so called danger of LGBT people to the sanctity of marriage and the family so that it’s sheeple (they don’t call it a “flock” for nothing) will forget about what the priests and the Church hierarchy did to the sanctity of childhood.
The only “miracle” this outfit has ever really performed was the transmutation of wine into Kool-Aid.  ”Drink of this, for this is my body B.S.

Who would Jesus hate?They said:

The Proposed Regulation May Infringe Upon the Rights of Faith-Based Organizations Not to Facilitate Shared Housing Arrangements That Violate the Organization’s Religious Beliefs.

My response is:

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?”
And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’
“Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”
He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
– Luke 10:25-37 RSV

And this too:

When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.
Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’
And the King will answer them, Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’
Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’
Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’
Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’
And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
– Matthew 25:31-46, RSV

How is is possible for a Christian to get in trouble with God for showing humanity and compassion?

responseResponse to both article and comments:  My wife and I were riding home on the train on March 9, and a lovely young woman got on who had ashes on her forehead in the shape of a cross.  I said, “I should write a poem about this,” and I did.  There is nothing specifically Catholic about it, nor do I think it applies only to the Catholic hierarchy, although it certainly does apply to them.  If I may be so immodest as to say so, however, I think it describes the subject of this post perfectly.
“Wednesday”
Speak softly.  Speak of peace, and grace, and love.
We need no bombs or guns, no hijacked planes.
No blood of honor murders stains our hands.
What use are these beside the twin millstones
Of guilt and fear, the grinding of the years?
The well of shame that beckons them to drown,
The prison wall of bleak unworthiness,
Too high to scale?  We know the subtler ways.
Now go.  To our long task, and where you tread,
Tread lightly.  Lightly, turn their souls to ash.

yet their Jesus…would still give them the chance for atonement because the “Word” that they rely so much on shows that he is loving and forgiving as they are not.
if their goal is in spreading his gospel they are so totally off-base with all the things that the gospel says.
as i have said so often before,

‘if Jesus were alive today, the last thing he would want to be is a christian.’

It’s time…to refer to the “United States Council of Catholic Bigots,” and to refer to its members as “Bigots” and “Archbigots.”  They absolutely loathe being labeled as haters, so we need to use the label every chance we get.  
From now on it’s not “Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York,” it’s “Timothy Dolan, Archbigot of New York,” informally, “Archbigot Dolan.”
You have your marching orders…

the problem isthese “good” Catholics/Christians don’t want to try to live by Jesus’ example, they just want to be able to believe in him to be forgiven for their sins.

My response.http://gemmaseymour.tumblr.com…

The Roman Catholic Church has, it seems, launched a new assault on Humanity. That is, a “new” assault only if they ever ceased attacking Humanity in the first place. Two articles appeared on my Facebook News Feed in the last couple of days, one from the web site Catholic Online, Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie: Transgender Activists, Cultural Revolution, and a news report from Daily Kos, Catholic Church Urged HUD on LGBT Americans: “Let Them Go Homeless”.
In the Catholic Online article, one Deacon Keith Fournier presents a startlingly false representation of the arguments of LGBT activists for the equal protection of our civil rights. This, I am sure, was prompted by the two lawsuits filed in New York City attempting the secure the rights of trans people to amended birth certificates in the absence of proof of undergoing sexual reassignment surgery, which as I have noted before, also amounts to proof of forced sterilization, a practice which is reviled the world over. It is prompted as well, I am certain (because Deacon Fournier attests to this fact explicitly), by the push for the equal protection of the right of LGBT to engage in civil marriage. Heading the article are the following statements:
   

The Gender Identity Movement demands the recognition of a ‘right’ to choose one’s gender and laws which accommodate, fund, and enforce such a ‘right’.
   The “Gender Identity Movement” is dangerous. It is a part of a broader Cultural Revolution which substitutes an entirely different view of the dignity of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing, human sexuality, marriage and the family and the moral basis of a free society than that which formed Western Civilization.

Although I find it interesting that Deacon Fournier is here attempting to co-opt the phrase “human flourishing” popularized by noted atheist Sam Harris in recent days, with his presentation at TED and especially his new book The Moral Landscape, I find myself asking some obvious questions about these assertions.
It is a well established doctrine of the modern theory of Natural Rights upon which the government of the United States was founded that rights are inherent in humankind, and require no recognition by any legal authority for their validity. Setting aside the fact that the equally well-established doctrine, specifically recognized by enumeration in the Constitution of the United States, of the Separation of Church and State dictates that the Roman Catholic Church and every other religion ought of right to keep its nose of civil government, a notion fully endorsed, I might add, by the very same Jesus of Nazareth whom the Catholic Church claims to admire in no small way, our Natural Rights also require no recognition by any religious authority for their validity.
In the second paragraph, however, I can find little fault with the statements of fact presented, except to say that the unqualified danger presented by those who advocate for the equal protection of the rights of gender variant people is, in truth, a danger only to those who would deny the equal protection of the rights of other human beings. Our way of life does indeed represent a Cultural Revolution, or more correctly, a cultural re-evolution, and despite the fact that Deacon Fournier would like to associate our need for Dignity with Maoist Communism by appropriating repeatedly the title given to the massive upheavals instituted by the government of the People’s Republic of China (which, it should be noted, involved crushing restrictions upon the practice of religion), it does indeed represent an entirely different view than that which formed Western Civilization.
Let us briefly set aside the fact that a good 3/5+ of the world’s population is not, and has not ever been, part of Western Civilization, and that a good portion of those people probably do not desire to ever become part of Western Civilization. Let us set aside the racial and ethnic superiority inherent in Deacon Fournier’s statements. Although Deacon Fournier evidently implies that the views which formed Western Civilization are superior to those which we would like to see replace them, he does not actually provide any arguments which prove this assertion. In fact, the entire article is riddled with statement of purported fact that amount to nothing more than unsupported assertions, assertions which, one should note, are in fact unsupportable in the face of modern Science. As well, in order to accept that the views of LGBT activists are not the views which formed Western Civilization, one first must endorse the notion that modern Western Civilization has not changed in the last several hundred years, and did not change, markedly so, with the advent of Natural Rights theory in the 17th Century. Arguably, the views which shaped the United States of America are, in fact, the views which LGBT activists espouse. This is the reason why I refer to a cultural “re-evolution”, rather than a cultural “revolution”. The revolution in philosophy happened over 400 years ago; it is only that we have failed to shepherd that revolution along competently, and have forgotten many of the ideas behind it.
This, of course, does not seem to bother Deacon Fournier, because he then becomes far too busy launching into a diatribe that utterly misrepresents the arguments against the sort of oppression for which the Catholic Church, among other religious sects, is infamous. He engages in gross distortions such as:
   

Anyone who maintains that there is no reference to the rejection of homosexual practices in the Bible has to remove this entire chapter and many other biblical references.

The truth is, the argument that is most commonly heard about the prevalence of Scripture that deals with homosexuality of transsexuality is that nowhere in the Bible does Jesus, Himself, speak against either of these things. It is actually pointed out by some scholars, that the passages in the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 19, may actually be an explicit endorsement of gender variance. For myself, I will not attempt to analyze this part of the Bible. I will say only that no secular historical record exists documenting the actual existence of Jesus, and not only are there no original copies of any part of the Bible that are known, we know for certain through modern comparative studies that the text that we know today as “The Holy Bible” has been tampered with over and over again throughout the millennia, so we cannot even be sure that what we call the Bible today constitutes an accurate representation of the text as originally written.
Fournier continues his attack by recycling arguments against the humane medical treatment that the medical, psychiatric, and scientific communities all agree are necessary for the, as Fournier might say, “human flourishing”, of transsexual people. He continues in a long tradition of comparing Sexual Reassignment Surgery to “mutilation” and the destruction of “bodily integrity”, of describing gender variance as “disorder”, and of defining the sex of a human bodies solely on chromosomal criteria, despite the growing scientific consensus that chromosomes alone are not final determinants of sexual differentiation. He advocates quite explicitly against bodily autonomy, a stance which the Catholic Church uses not only in this area, but to decry the freedom of a woman over her own reproductive organs and processes. He paints trans bodies as “artificial” and “synthetic” in a blatant attempt to undermine sympathy for our natural origins.
The final part of his article is dedicated to what can only be described as an unbelievably hypocritical recounting of the ways in which the Roman Catholic Church denies LGBT people the opportunity to serve in the Catholic community, citing “Documents of Faith” as if they are in any way an acceptable substitute for scientific inquiry. The hypocrisy enters the picture where the Catholic Church categorically bans any person who has received any type of sexual reassignment surgery from marriage, from ordination to the priesthood, and from “entering the religious life”, by which I assume they mean one would presumably be barred from becoming a nun, a monk, or even a deacon in the Church. Possibly other vocations are also banned; however, I am not intimately familiar with all possible Roman Catholic vocations. This, from a religion which claims to be guided by the teachings of Jesus.
The Roman Catholic Church, is of course, a large organization, and by no means entirely homogeneous in belief, even though the leadership of the Church would have you believe that anyone who disagrees with any missive from the Bishop of Rome is no true member of the Church, and Deacon Fournier’s views represent, for the most part, the views of a single man, however justified he may feel by Church doctrine which agrees with his standpoint. The leadership of the Church, however, has not stood idle, but has taken an active role in attempting to suppress public acceptance of the equal protection of the rights of those with whom it disagrees or those whom it finds distasteful.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a press release detailing its opposition to new regulations proposed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development designed to counter discrimination against LGBT people in accessing housing. They, too, use the tactics of distortion of the truth and outright falsity to accomplish their goals. Among the points they address are:
   

1. The Proposed Regulation Lacks Any Statutory Basis and Undermines the Policy of a Statute in Full Force, the Defense of Marriage Act.

There are two types of Federal laws in this country, a fact with which many people may not be aware. There is the United States Code, which is comprised of the laws passed by Congress and signed by the President of the United States, and then there is the Code of Federal Regulations, the actual rules by which the various departments and agencies of the federal government perform the duties delegated to them by the United States Code. Each department sets its own regulations, independent of each other, and independent of the direct involvement of Congress. The ability of the departments to set their regulations is, in fact, authorized by statute, rendering the first half of this statement utterly false, the which is understood by any person with even a cursory knowledge of the structure of the United States Government.
To further claim that these proposed regulations would, if enacted, undermine the Defense of Marriage Act is on the surface of it a valid complaint; however, as with Deacon Fournier’s complaint about the views of LGBT activists being counter to those which formed Western Civilization, especially in an environment where the Department of Justice is no longer defending lawsuits challenging that Act, and especially in a country where we have a tradition of reversing unconstitutional legislation as well-established as is the First Amendment and the conception of Natural Rights that underpins all our founding documents, the complaint is neither morally justified, nor is the relevance of the complaint established.
   

2. The Proposed Regulation May Infringe Upon the Rights of Faith-Based Organizations Not to Facilitate Shared Housing Arrangements That Violate the Organization’s Religious Beliefs.

This is nothing more than a red herring complaint. Every piece of legislation that has passed in this country which guarantees the equal protection of the rights of gender variant people has within it exceptions that allow for religious organization to continue their discriminatory practices on religious grounds. There is virtually no possibility that this is going to change at all, let alone at the behest of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
I find myself wondering how neither Deacon Fournier nor Catholic Online seem to have the capability of self-reflection. Did they not consider the hypocritical ramifications of such a subtitle as “Exchanging the Truth of God For a Lie”?
I was raised in a Christian family, like many Americans. Unlike many Americans, however, my education in religious topics was far more extensive than most. I am very deeply concerned by the evident trend in the modern era for people who purport to be Christian to abandon the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of peace, of compassion, and of forgiveness. More and more, the teachings of Jesus are being replaced by teachings which can only be described as anti-Christ.
Anti-Christ. Antichrist.
For so that which goes against the teachings of Christ must, therefore, by definition, be.
Yet, I see little evidence that rational Christians are willing to stand up for Jesus and his teachings, to Witness to the world that which is Truth, as we are Called by Him, and denounce these false prophets.
Jesus, as I recall, taught us that God loves all of His Creation, not just the parts of it that Paul of Tarsus, whom Fournier seems to enjoy quoting as justification for his outrageously anti-Christ beliefs, deems worthy of His Love. These anti-Christ proselytizers also frequently quote from portions of the Old Testament as justification for their persecution of LGBT people, and back this up with the passage in the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 5, where Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”
They conveniently read into modern, or relatively modern, translations meanings which we cannot accurately or definitively ascribe to the words of Matthew in order to achieve their goals. They conveniently ignore the passages in the Book of Jeremiah, echoed in the Book of Hebrews, whereby Jesus is proclaimed to herald a New Covenant. Which interpretation are we to believe? That Jesus came to enforce the old Jewish laws, or that he came to establish a new Law? Is it possibly that the literal meaning of the text fails to convey the proper meaning? I leave the answer as an exercise for the reader.
Daily Kos responds with this quote:
 

Frankly, I rather resent being scolded on my morality by a organization that just paid out $250,000,000 to settle 700 cases of abusing and raping children, cases that will never be prosecuted. Bishops? Heal thy own soul please.

Last night, I myself was moved to respond to Deacon Fournier’s article, in the kind of response that perhaps reaches people such as he least well, it would seem, but in the kind of words which I would hope that all people who claim to be Christian would take to their hearts. I will leave you with this comment which I posted at Catholic Online, and which I think is equally fitting as a response to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
O, Babylon! Mighty are thy Works, and Wicked thy Purpose!
When did Sin so vile that even the death of Jesus Christ Himself cannot absolve it come into being? Who set thee above thy brethren to sit in Judgment? Knowest thou the Mind of God? Nay, for no mortal can know His Purpose.
Beware these people, my friends. Beware, lest they lead us all unto Doom. Wolves they are, wolves in the guise of The Lamb. Remember the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. Verily I say unto thee: that which thou doest unto the least of these thy brethren, thou doest also unto the Lord Thy God.
Didst thou believe that when He said, as recorded in the Gospel, “But, behold! The hand of him that betrayeth me with me on the table. And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!,” that He spake of Judas alone?
Didst thou neither listen when “He was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Is the Kingdom of God naught more to thee than a place upon the Earth?
Do not listen to my words, for I am no Great Prophet, nor High Priestess. If thou wouldst follow Christ, listen to Him, to His Word, and to No Other. Accept not those who say, “Here is The Word,” but find The Word for thyself, wherever it may be, for The Word remains within us and all around us. Know thou that in The Beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God, and Know that God is Love.
The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Community of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.
Amen.

Maura Hennessey urges US government to only fund Catholic programmes through foreign aid billsWhereas;
  The Catholic Church claims diplolmatic immunity for crimes based upon its unique nation-state status and therefore Catholic Heirarchy in the US are acting as agents of a foreign power,
   It is clear that programmes administered by the Catholic Church should ONLY be funded through foreign aid bills and that States are forbidden under the US Constitution from contributing to Catholic programmes as foreign policy is reserved to the federal government under the Constitution.
This would remove the need for exemptions for Catholic Programmes, and given the hostility towwards foreign aid in general, pretty much dry up their funding.

Still more garage SPAM

Brillant!That is one hell of an argument. You rock!

Too bad…..……that couldn’t be expanded to include other religious groups :-/
But I do agree! I love the idea!

Foreign Agents Registration ActThe Foreign Agents Registration Act, U.S.C. § 611 et seq., available at http://www.fara.gov/ makes it abundantly clear they are agents of a foreign power.  Go to the web site and see for yourselves.

Interesting.Although, searches for “Holy See”, “Vatican”, and “Catholic” do not turn up any results which seem appropriate…
I’d like to find their official listing.