Monday, March 4, 2013

Mary Elizabeth Williams on Cardinal O'Brien, Hypocrisy, and "Tyranny of Tolerance"




Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon on O'Brien and the "tyranny of tolerance":


Whatever the details of O’Brien’s actions, they appear to reflect a nauseatingly familiar pattern within the church’s ranks – coercion, secrecy and abuse of power. And they reveal the sad and sickening hypocrisy of the men within the church who’d use their influence to attack others and thwart the progress of human rights, all while indulging their own desires. It was exactly one year ago that O’Brien, then the U.K.’s highest ranking church official published a fiery condemnation of the “madness” of same-sex unions, and railing against — no, really — “the tyranny of tolerance.” Because if there’s one thing your guy Jesus found totally tyrannical, it’d be tolerance, right, your eminence? In his op-ed for the Telegraph, he then went on to refer to marriage equality as “a grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” that is “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual well being of those involved,” and to complain that in some schools, homosexuality is now deemed “normal.”

And she's right. In spades. 

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