The position of the Catholic Church, and John Paul II, isn't just against abortion. It's against birth control of any kind. It's against any sex outside of marriage, any sex that isn't designed for procreation. In fact, it's against masturbation.

If the Pope was sincere, and that's one thing I'll definitely give him is I do think he was, that means he's never had any kind of sex, even wanking off.

How many of you could do this? (Remember, no masturbation.) Especially those of you who are male? Can't we postulate that the ability to remain completely celibate is on the far fringes of human behavior? I certainly think so.

This, of course, isn't about Pope John Paul II, really. They're all celibate, at least in theory. No sex? Ever? Anyone that can do that is either superhuman, has an abnormally low sex drive, or is repressing something very deeply (and sometimes that repression cracks like an egg and you molest altar boys.)

And this is the problem.

This was prompted by Farfolo's "There is no God" diary.

First, my biases: I am a spiritual agnostic Unitarian-Universalist who was raised Catholic. My opinions of Catholicism are mostly negative--tempered by some great Xaverian Brothers I had at my high school.

I'm an agnostic, as I said, so this isn't going to be about whether or not God exists. I have no idea what exists.

What I want to talk about is where religion becomes oppressive. Since I was raised Catholic and most of the oppressive religious people in this country are Christian, that's where I'm going to concentrate.

So, my problem is this: where faith and the Bible intersect.

More on the flip side.

Believe it or not :-).

There's other issues being bandied about that cross, or blur, or don't completely understand, the line between the personal or the political. Schiavo is a current example of that--where some people who should know better have politicized what should be a personal issue--but there's more. And some of the others are far more subtle.

And one of them, that a lot of people around here don't get--is Walmart.

More after the flip.

I've been thinking about this a lot. This diary's not going to be short. And it's probably going to be a muddled mess. But here goes...

We'll call her Beth. That wasn't her name, but I've been writing one of my little stories, and it's partially autobiographical, and that's what I called her in it--Beth. So, we'll stick with that.

Dick Radatz died yesterday. He fell down a flight of stairs in his home and suffered massive head trauma. He was only 67.

"OK, CoB," at least some of you are now saying, "that's fine, but who the hell was Dick Radatz?"

Well, I'll tell you. Mariano Rivera. Keith Foulke. Trevor Hoffman, Dennis Eckersley, Jeff Reardon. Even Rollie Fingers, Bruce Sutter, and Mike Marshall. They were all Dick Radatz's grandchildren.

I work in retail.

This automatically means I'm underpaid, underinsured, under-vacationed...and, as retail outfits go, the one I work for is pretty good. I've worked for a lot worse. But no retail employee below management level (and at management level in some places) is anything but working class.

We're Democrats. Me, and people like me, should be the face of this party. And in some cases, we are. But it's not all about politics.

Yes, I got set off by a comment in teacherken's diary about playing math parlor tricks to retail employees. But it's not just that. It seems my place of employment has been asshole magnet this week. So, I'm going to rant. And, no, I'm not generally this fed up at the job in front of customers. I put on what an old boss used to call the Happy Smiling Retail Face when I go out on the sales floor. But, here, I'm going to rant.

How do you treat retail employees?

..because my last diary and a few of my recent comments have gotten me some comment on it.

A few years ago, I was posting regularly on an atheist/agnostic board. (It got boring after a while :-)).

Anyhow, as this wasn't a moderated board, quite often we'd get the Thumpers disruptin' the place. Often their technique was to post wildly-out-of-context Bible quotes, designed to support whatever right-wing-nuttery they were pushing that day.

Most people--as in a lot of places--felt compelled to argue with the trolls. Which just led to more arguing. After a couple of times doing this myself, I decided on a different technique. I started answering the Bible quotes with quotes from Bruce Springsteen songs.

What I'm sick and tired of is the bandying about of the word. Because here in the USA we do not live in a democracy. We live in a Constitutional Republic. There is a difference, and it is a significant one.

The big difference is this: the Constitution trumps the 'will of the People'. The Constitution has an amendment process, and every step of it takes supermajorities. And the most important part of the Constitution, to me anyway, the Bill of Rights, can't be amended out of existance.

It frustrates me to no end that, every time there's an opinion from the Supreme Court--or from a state Supreme Court ruling about that state's constitution--somebody starts blathering about the courts usurping 'democracy'. That the court 'took away the people's ability to decide.' Damn right. That's their job. I'll say it again: the constitution trumps the majority. Every time. You can argue a court's wisdom in applying that at times, but you can't argue their duty to do so.

OK, so let's get my questionable ethics out of the way first.

Hello. My name is Church of Bruce. You killed my father. Prepare to die...

No, wait a minute. Scratch that. Sorry, couldn't resist--my daughter is sitting here while I write this and she loves Princess Bride almost as much as I do :-).

Anyhow, let's try that again. Hello. My name is Church of Bruce. And I download music from the internet.

Generally not commercially available stuff. I'm not going to say I've never done it. But generally not. I'm not counting downloading stuff I already own. Sometimes it's easier to download than to make a copy of my CD--or worse, a tape--but I have no problem with that. I did buy it.

However, I'm not talking about downloading commercially available stuff here. That's not, bascially, what I do.

I didn't want to post this in the Hunter Thompson post, because I agreed with some people who said that wasn't the place for it. And we don't know what was going on in Mr. Thompson's life. Suicide due to terminal illness is something different, and if Mr. Thompson had a terminal illness that we don't know about, and that's why he killed himself, what I'm about to say doesn't apply. And severe physical pain is a grey area, especially if the pain is chronic and isn't ever going to get better.

Jeff Jacoby, the conservative op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote a great column today. It's about the argument to expand the House of Representatives. It's well-argued, and I think it's right on.

The colubm is here.

He points out that our ratio of one rep for approximately 674,000 people is way out of whack with the rest of the 'democratic' world. He even contrasts it with Iraq--the parliament that the Iraqis are going to vote for at the end of the month has one legislator for each 91,000 people. That's in line with a lot of other democracies, such as the UK (1 per 91,000), France (1 per 104,000), Canada (105,000) and so on.

Let's face it, that's the next national biggie. (Here in MA, we need to get Romney out the same year).

I was looking at the list of senators up for reelection in 2006, mainly for an eye to which parties have how many seats up, and who might be vulnerable.

As for the party breakdown, it's just about even: 16 Democrats, 16 Republicans, and Jeffords.

The first-glance 'fairly safe seats' breakdown, however, I think favor us. Now, I don't know if any of the senators up for reelection in 2006 have said anything about retiring, and that would skew my thoughts on this. But I looked at the list of Senators for a few things--Dems in clearly blue states or Repubs in clearly red states, or 'clout' for lack of a better term. (Example of 'clout'--Robert Byrd, Dem in a swing state, but will never lose an election in WV).

It's taken me 12 hours to be semi-coherent about this.

I am 39 years old. From the time I was aware of them, I've been a Red Sox fan. My first clear memory is of them blowing an August lead in 1974. '75 was a mixed blessing. Then came 1978.

I was 13 in 1978--the true 'formative years' when it comes to learning about the world. In addition to all the normal pubescent discoveries, I also learned that the Red Sox will manage to lose in the most horrible ways imaginable. 8 years later, in 1986, that was reinforced. At least I was 21 that year and was able to drink heavily.

KGtL wrote a diary entry earlier today about how he thinks Democrats should push for the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

I thought about it...and there are circumstances that I might agree with him. However, those circumstances don't exist. In this diary, I'll talk about that and a few other things regarding abortion.

This is an amplification of a comment I made over in Atrios-land, on another endless Nader thread.

John Kerry's getting hammered. Of course he's getting hammered by the Righties--but he's also getting hammered by the Naderites and the odd disaffected Deaniac. Even some who aren't hammering him, and support his candidacy, from the left, are doing so in an hold-your-nose ABB way.

John Kerry's been my senator for 18 years, and I've been trying to figure out exactly how he morphed into a psuedo-Republican.

So, I did some research, and came up with some answers.

He didn't. With a couple of exceptions.

Hey, my first diary entry!

I've been thinking about the common meme that President Reagan "ended the cold war". I'm an amateur student of the USSR, and I've always thought it was crap. Lately I've been thinking of why I disagree with it.

First of all, I don't know if you can ever say one person 'ended the cold war'. There were a lot of people. Someone on another blog offered up the foreign minister of Hungary that opened the Hungarian borders in 1989 (a fine choice). There's Gorbachev. Sheverdnadze. Lech Walesa. There's a number of people.

And yes, Reagan played a part. Even us lefties can't deny that. The way he played a part was abandoning the stale rhetoric and realizing that Gorbachev was someone he could 'do business with' (though Thatcher saw that first). But that just makes him a cog in the machine.