A few years ago, Sister Margaret Farley, a nun and a teacher at Yale's Divinity School, published Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics—a book that did not say that your sexual urges are nothing more than the shameful pangs of demon penises fucking your soul which should be repressed and repressed and repressed until you are absolutely warped, underneath that church outfit. Burn the witch! Ahh, apparently we don't do that any more? Well... censure the witch!

That's exactly what the Vatican has done: they've formally scolded her (like a naughty, naughty schoolgirl?), saying that her book—what with its common-sense approval of female masturbation and approval of same sex marriage—goes against Catholic theology and should not be used by Catholics and is "contrary to natural law."

Well. La dee frickin da.

Can you imagine anything more laughably small-minded and farther away from anything that might be helpful to actual humans here on planet Earth than a small cabal of alleged moral leaders who deliberate in secret for two years and then issue a statement condemning an obscure book because it had the grace to approach human sexuality from a rational and non-hateful position? All of the Cardinals of the Vatican could have better spent that time building Habitat for Humanity houses, or digging sanitation ditches in rural Africa. Catholic Church, it is really quite difficult to take you people seriously. You dress up and live in a fortified special city away from the world you proclaim to care for, and then, when the time comes for you to finally speak, you say something so patently stupid, backwards, hateful, discriminatory, and downright unrealistic that any 13 year-old can tell you that you've removed yourself from the sphere of reasonable discussion. Keep talking amongst yourselves, o Holy relics. The rest of us, who make up the vast majority of the people in the world, thank god, will just carry on without you.

Go fuck yourself, The Vatican. It might make you feel better.

[NYT. Photo: AP]