How thoughtful of Pope John Paul II and the Vatican to reach out to me on my birthday, with their “Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons.” With no regrets, however, I’d like to return the gift, as it just doesn’t fit; I guess it was difficult for the Holy Father to shop for something appropriate with that huge log in his eye.

The hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, especially in categorizing homosexual unions as “evil,” and in condemning the adoption of children by “persons living in [homosexual] unions” as “doing violence to these children,” is particularly egregious. If “clear and emphatic opposition” is a moral duty, as this document maintains, then given the almost unparalleled violence against children perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, its own members must clearly and emphatically oppose its assumed authority in such matters.

Pope Pius did not condemn the Nazis as “evil” on behalf of the Catholic Church, nor has the current Pope been willing to use that term to describe Saddam Hussein. Yet homosexual unions are branded as “evil,” “immoral,” “deviant” and “against natural moral law,” and homsexuality as “objectively disordered”: such inflammatory language is considered, by the Vatican, to express its “respect for homosexual persons.”

Puh-lease. This definition of “respect” is more twisted even than Dubya’s “welcoming” attitude toward homosexuals and the “inclusiveness, fairness, tolerance and compassion” (per Mssrs. Bush and Frist) of Senator Santorum. I don’t need the Catholic Church’s respect; I just need them to keep their inquisitional, collaborationist, pedophilic hands the hell out of my life.