Originally uploaded by blmurch
First up, the good. Yesterday, Argentina legalised same-sex marriage. All married couples now have equal rights in inheritance, benefits and adoption. See the clip here for the jubilation when the vote was passed.
(I strongly believe that the UK should allow gay marriage, and not just civil partnerships. Supporters of civil partnerships claim that it allows the same benefits as marriage. Why not, then, call it marriage? And if, as the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, the term marriage is "intimately bound up with the question of religious freedom", why allow heterosexual couples who have a civil ceremony to refer to themselves as "married"? Are they not also in a 'civil partnership', having married solely under civil, and not religious, law? Until the law is changed to allow same-sex marriage in the UK, there can be no equality on this matter. It truly is one rule for one group in society, and another for everyone else.)
Next, the bad. In continuing its opposition to women priests, the Vatican has issued a decree which makes the attempted ordination of women as serious an ecclesiastical crime as paedophilia. Both the woman and the bishop who performs the ceremony will be excommunicated.
I was raised a Roman Catholic. I also consider myself a feminist. The more time I devote to thinking about my faith, the more I wonder if the two aren't utterly incompatible.
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