When Should I Become Anti-Catholic?

Americans have a choice. We can be tolerant of everything (which must include intolerance). Or we can be intolerant of some things (which might, but need not, be limited to intolerance).

I happen to be a big fan of intolerance. I think America, and specifically the left, could benefit from a healthy helping of it. And let's be open about it. If some group out there proudly identifies itself as anti-somethingwevalue, why shouldn't we respond with a declaration of proud anti-whateverisantisomethingwevalue-ism?

Which brings me to the Catholic church. The Vatican, Pope Benedict's secret hideout, is about to issue a new hiring policy, the details of which have been leaked: No fags allowed. In fact, the Catholic church is now not only a proud discriminator against fags, queers, dykes, sword swallowers and presumably other carny folk, Papa Benedict is going so far as to prohibit from its seminaries and its, um, "sacred orders" (By The Power of Greyskull!) "those who...support so-called gay culture."

That's right, while the corporate media goes bat-shit on the no-shit anti-gay angle, it turns out the Vatican is also implementing job discrimination against, well, male fag hags, I guess. Metrosexuals, perhaps. Straight men who enjoy Broadway musicals. Writers. Me, maybe. I've supported the so-called gay culture, which I take to include, well, all culture. So, no priesthood for me: The Vatican is anti-me. Shouldn't it be okay, then, for me to be anti-them?

I don't mean to suggest that I think all Catholics are bad people, or that we should discriminate against them. But when an institution advertises and defends hateful policies of employment discrimination, doesn't that put a burden on those who identify themselves as members of that institution either to disavow it, disavow its policies, or accept the logic that, otherwise, we must assume they embrace the policies of the organization with which they willingly, publicly identify?

At what point does an organization, an ideology, a religion, slip from being one that enjoys the assumption of beneficence to become one that is seen, and treated, as an advocate and propagator of hate?

Back in college, for the April Fools issue of The Tufts Daily, our lead story was that Kurt Waldheim (then the UN Secretary General), was going to give Tufts' commencement speech. The point was to lampoon Tufts' decision to hold commencement on a Jewish holiday. But one of the lines we included in the story was a defense of the fictional Waldheim booking, in which Waldheim (or a surrogate) protested: "You never hear about the nice Nazis, the ones who care."

Today, I have to wonder, what will it mean to be a good Catholic, if Catholicism itself goes bad?