Catholic Family Values

For all the family values posturing the Catholic Church does, in addition to touching little boys where they pee from time to time and dismissing sex education as blasphemous in nations where the percentage of HIV positive people are in the double digits, they sure know how to ruin a party. A funeral party that is.

Enter John McCusker, a small business owner in the San Diego area who died recently of an unexpected heart attack, at the ripe age of 31. John was a good Catholic as he was never caught intentionally violating any of the 10 commandments, including the 8 that have nothing to do with the law, and his family was looking to have a proper Catholic funeral and burial for him. If you've never been to a Catholic funeral I can tell you, as someone who's father was a Catholic monk for 8 years, their funerals are almost depressing as their Weddings - with virtually the same amount of information regarding God and Jesus, and the same lack of information about the wedded or the deceased. Nevertheless, John's family knew this and was willing to proceed with the ceremony.

They were unexpectedly slapped on the wrist by the Catholic powers that be in San Diego, and were promptly denied a funeral at the University of San Diego and in any Catholic church or chapel in the Diocese of San Diego. Why, might you ask? Because John owned a couple of gay bars. Not adult bars, not bars with sex in the back rooms - bars where gay people can go, meet other gay people, and not get tied to a fence and beaten to death by some redneck fuck in the parking lot for making eyes at them across the pool table.

So, allow me to recap for the Catholic Church, since it has enough trouble justifying it's recent unflattering headlines in your local paper: If you are a Priest and you ruin kids' lives by sexually molesting them and pressuring them not to tell mom and dad, your punishment is transferal to another district. If you are a member of the small business community who owned a couple of bars in which boys might have kissed each other, you're barred from the Church.

Keep in mind, the issue here is to give someone a funeral. You have to ask yourself how much this church respects life if they're unwilling to accommodate someone in death. This exactly why when I see a salvation army donation bucket, or I hear about various Catholic charities around my home state of Maine, I cannot bring myself to support them financially. Until they start supporting people in my life, my pockets are mysteriously empty for people in theirs.

This is not to say that all Catholics or even a majority feel this way, because there were many good Catholics in Southern California who are completely bullshit about this, as they should be. What it does reflect poorly on, however, is their leadership. The lack of pressure on the Catholic church to forward their minds at least past the 15th century is disturbing and it's costing lives, especially via their stance on sex education in this country and abroad. Until they're able to get their collective heads out of their asses (or that of their alter boys'), the few bad apples will in fact spoil the whole bunch.