Devote Irish RC conservative/liberal and GT12 fave Andrew Sullivan recently discovered that, while giving up on selling indulgences centuries ago, there's still a market for annulments in the divorce-forbidding Roman Catholic Church.
There a number of posts, so I won't link (see the link at right for his blog) to just one but I will include this quote, because Andrew has suddenly also figured out that Marriage is not just a religious term. He does seem to neglect observing that children from an annulled marriage are, by definition, bastards (but not necessarily future members of one of my bands)
If the church is utterly indifferent to marriages conducted by other churches or the state, then why has it devoted so much effort to demonizing civil marriages for gay couples? Shouldn't they be as irrelevant to the Vatican as, say, civil divorce or re-marriages in other churches? The double standards abound. Some of them can be explained by catering to the rich and powerful (the Kidmans and Sinatras and Kerrys); some can be explained by Orwellian-speak (calling divorces "annulments"); but some can only be explained by bigotry and fear. None of it speaks that well of the Church, it seems to me.
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