The Vatican drops its latest turd into the American echo chamber:

The Vatican newspaper on Monday criticized the removal of a feeding tube from a brain-damaged Florida woman, saying nobody can claim the right to decide whether a human being lives or dies.

Nothing new here of course, but the beyond-laughable outrageousness of the hypocrisy of these dress-wearing palace dwellers never ceases to astonish. Has the business of the Church ever been anything other than claiming the right to decide whether human beings live or die? What else have they ever concerned themselves with? A thousand years ago, five hundred years ago, now?

In fact, can you point to any major sphere of the administration of modern life that doesn't concern itself, directly or indirectly, with deciding who gets to live and who not? Where does food get distributed? Will condoms be disbursed? Will the prosecutor seek the death penalty, or life without parole? Which insurance plan does the hospital accept? Will the new homeless shelter get funded? Will the reserves get sent off to war?

For fuck's sake, Bush himself signed a law in 1999 which gives not only doctors but faceless number-crunching "health-care providers" the right to decide whether a patient lives or dies even over the objections of the patient's family, and even over the objections of the patient himself.

I mean come on!!! Is modern life anything but a vast bureaucratic mechanism for the management of human life and death? Bush's Right-to-Death law is certainly not the exception--I mean, it's expensive to keep folks alive, and somebody's gotta pay!

It's kind of funny, too: a hundred years ago (and even fifty years ago) it was the right-wingers in America crying about Popish conspiracies, Rome trying sully American liberty with its filthy WOP hands. Now the right-wingers can't wait to gobble up whatever juicy turd the Vatican decides to grace us with next. As long as they can be counted on to be reliable fag-bashing buddies, even (especially) the "evangelicals" are cool with the Catholics.

Except, wait, look out "evangelicals"--now that the U.S. election is over, and a Holy Ring-kissing murderer safely ensconced in the White House, look what kind of traitorous stunt these white-robed cowards are trying to pull:

In the week before Easter, as Christians reflect on the execution of Jesus, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is launching a campaign to end the use of the death penalty in the United States.

Q: Why does the Catholic church hate America? Where would Christians be without the death penalty? Jesus would have gone on galavanting around, spouting off his incendiary nonsense, and we never would have had the satisfaction of killing him, and then of worshipping his murder! The death penalty is the best thing a Christian can hope for!

Look for Joe Lieberman to shortly announce himself co-sponsor of a new constitutional amendment banning issue activism by anyone suspected of having consorted with a pedophile.