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The Los Angeles Dodgers, a baseball team are apparently hosting a "pride night" and have invited a group called "The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" to perform at it.
The "sisters" are of course not sisters at all, but in fact, an anti catholic group of men who dress as nuns and mock catholics.
Originally the Dodgers, a baseball team, after learning that this was essentially an anti-Catholic hate group, uninvited them. However, they recently re-invited them.
What is the fucking point of this? What possible reason does a baseball team have to indicate a sexual preference? And why does this include mocking Catholics?
God this stuff is demoralizing. Is that the point?
Where is your evidence that they are anti-Catholic? You linked to their website, but there is nothing there about Catholicism at all. That is in marked contrast to the websites of actually anti-Catholic groups.
This is a phrase used to describe Catholic Nuns, because of the Roman Catholic title “lady of perpetual hope”
This is a play on the Catholic practice of indulgence. Combined together this is sufficient to prove their malice, but to add another:
I suppose an inverse example would be if I called myself “the LGBT Queer Alliance”, and my public spectacle was actually St George defeating a rainbow dragon which just happens to be prancing around in rainbow colors. Clearly my intent would be malicious against the LGBT theme.
Yes, it is clear that they are referring to Catholic nuns. No one disputes that. But, contrary to your claim, evidence of malice is missing.
And your hypothetical does not work, because the picture you describe seems to advocate for the destruction of LGBTQ people or organizations (I have no idea what it means to be malicious "against a theme."). Were there evidence of the group advocating the destruction of Catholicism, or taxing churches, or telling people not to send their kids to Catholic schools, or even complaining about ostensibly homophobic Church teachings, you might have a case. But I don't see any such evidence.
Right so if I made a dance troupe called The Bugchasing Rock Spiders, and they were good dancers and singers and occasionally made innuendo about wanting to bang your small children, that would not reflect any malice?
Also note that I made this group 50 years ago and due to an explosion in homophobia over the past decade business has boomed and we have acquired major corporate sponsorships requiring we sanitise our image to some extent, so now the innuendo is restricted to tweens and older.
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So what if my example were instead colorful LGBT people in sackcloth and ashes, begging repentance from a nun on their knees, and then it finally being granted? This is the traditional liturgy of Catholicism, much like the liturgy of transvestites is dancing with a lot of colorful clothing. The above liturgy is “nuns -> actually dancing transvestites”. What if we did “transvestites -> actually repentant sinners”? If it leaves an inexplicable bad taste in your mouth, then there is probably a moral residue, based around such nebulous (yet significant) concepts like “respecting a group’s symbology and name”.
? What message is that skit supposed to be sending? Wouldn't that simply be a claim that being LGBT is not a sin, or is a forgivable one*? How is it saying anything negative about Catholicism at all?
*Which, btw, if I am not mistaken, is consistent with current Catholic doctrine.
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Five days ago you said
@naraburns @desolation This might be helpful context for your discussions.
I said that based on what I remember from reading about them 30+ years ago when they were in the news fairly often in the Bay Area, and before I looked at their website and saw nothing re Catholicism at all. I was mistaken; now I am pretty sure that they are just being juvenile. Or that they have changed over time (it was initially something like 4 guys; now it is a 503(c).
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I'm guessing you didn't notice the non-underlined space in-between "and" and "mock"? The "mock catholics" link is to video of a man pole-dancing on a crucifix.
You are correct that I did not see the gap. But, is the video actually about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? I think I see one "nun" in the background watching but I don't see any participating in the performance. And 2) what exactly is anti-Catholic about sexualizing Jesus? If I said, "I want to fuck Jesus," I am sure that some Catholics would be offended. But how is that statement anti-Catholic? As opposed to expressing an idea that disagrees with Catholic doctrine?
You really think that statement is a simple theological disagreement? It doesn't just disagree with Catholic doctrine, it mocks it. This is obvious.
if so, so what? How does "mocking" an idea somehow become more "anti-Catholic" than criticizing it? And, tell me, what exactly does "anti-Catholic" mean? Surely, if it is objectionable, then it must mean something more than mocking ideas; it must mean saying something negative about people. That is what anti-Semitism is, right? It is not simply a statement that certain doctrines of Judaism are wrong; it is a statement that something is wrong with Jewish people. Ditto re racist statements, and homophobic statements, and sexist statements, etc.
Is smearing bacon on a Quran islamophobic?
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By your reasoning here, an outright racial slur is not anti-(a race).
I don't understand. Isn't a racial slur saying something negative about people? That is certainly my understanding.
A racial slur is negative in the same way that mocking is saying something negative. I don't know a coherent standard for "saying something negative" that would let you count one and not the other.
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I'm going down the list of slurs in my head, and can't think of a single one that says a specific negative thing about anybody. They're just another way if saying someone is black/Jewish/gay/etc.
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There are certain beliefs and practices so strongly tied to a group's identity that to mock the belief/practice and to mock the group of people is one and the same.
And is this one of those cases? Because, again, all they seem to do is dress as nuns.
The original usage of "anti catholic" in this thread referred simply to a group created solely to mock a group of Catholics. This is hardly pro-Catholic, is it? I think you are attempting to make the phrase "anti Catholic" both stronger and more specific than it really is in order to say that that usage of the phrase was incorrect.
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But being "worse" is a claim about degree, not about kind.
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Because it's an idea that disagrees with Catholic doctrine and not only is it expressed in a very rude and aggressive way, but that aspect is tied to why you'd want to say it in the first place. There's a reason why it would be nothing more than a weak joke to say "I find Jesus sexually attractive", and why nobody would actually say that.
I don't for one moment buy that a man pole dancing on a crucifix is just a disagreement with doctrine. The whole reason for doing it is that Catholics don't like them doing it. I'm not even sure what doctrine they're purportedly expressing.
If you don't know what they are trying to say, then how are you so sure it is anti-Catholic
Why anti-Catholic, as opposed to anti-Protestant or anti-Eastern Orthodox?
Most importantly, let's not forget that there is no reason to think that the performance is actually by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The evidence therefor seems to be zero.
I know what they are trying to say, but what they are trying to say doesn't include nontrivial objections to doctrine.
Assuming the "nuns" are involved, nuns are associated in the popular consciousness with Catholics. It doesn't matter for these purposes that some other groups also have nuns.
Can you link to the group commenting on any doctrine, trivial or otherwise?
I was referring to the linked video of the pole dancing, which does not include nuns.
To be fair, they are trivially commenting on doctrine, so I shouldn't have said that they're not commenting on doctrine at all. "Catholics think it's bad to show nuns and Jesus in a sexual context" is, technically a doctrine, and by deliberately doing that anyway, they are trivially commenting that they disagree with it. I wouldn't count that, of course, as nontrivially commenting on it.
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I don't believe they are commenting on doctrine, so of course I can't link to examples of them doing what I just said they aren't doing.
You can mock X and be anti-X without commenting on X's doctrine at all.
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Jiro does know what they're trying to say; they're trying to mock Catholics. The point was not "the meaning to this behavior is unclear" but rather "the meaning to this behavior would be unclear were your point correct".
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It is one of the many small differences between Protestants and Catholics. Raised Protestant, I was told those evil Catholics were wrong to have a crucifix (instead of just a cross) because Jesus was no longer on the cross.
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...you don't think a panoply of wildly caricatured Catholic nuns is about Catholicism "at all?"
About? At all? Yes. But anti? No, not per se. There are a thousand reasons to dress in drag as a nun other than being anti-Catholic. To criticize certain Catholic doctrines re homosexuality. To push back on political efforts by organized religion (a big deal in 1979). Or just to be ironic, given that nuns are meant to be chaste.
And, btw, one can criticize the Catholic Church (an enormously powerful institution) without criticizing either Catholics or Catholicism.
So would you agree that blackface is not "anti-black" per se? Do you believe that caricatures of Jews are not "anti-Semitic" per se?
Er... maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "anti-Catholic," but criticizing Catholic doctrines of homosexuality sounds paradigmatically "anti-Catholic" to me. Pushing back on political efforts by the Catholic church seems "anti-Catholic," especially given the Church's long political history.
Catholics, maybe, but Catholicism? This seems like splitting hairs incredibly fine, to the point of suggesting a motte and bailey doctrine at play. Mockery has long been a highly effective approach to criticism, and criticism is not pro-, it is anti-.
"You can keep your Catholicism, we're just going to level your Church, caricature your symbols, mock your practices--no, we're not anti-Catholic per se, don't be ridiculous!"
That seems implausible to me.
Being Catholic is a choice in a way that being black or ethnic Jewish is not. Hence making fun of blacks or ethnic Jews for being blacks or ethnic Jews is more mean spirited than making fun of Catholics for being Catholics.
There is a difference of quality between, for example, making fun of a person for thinking that the Earth is flat and making fun of a person because he belongs to a certain ethnic group. Both are mean spirited, but the former is at least potentially part of some kind of meaningful debate, whereas the latter leads nowhere except to divisiveness.
No, it's not. There's a difference but it's much smaller than people imagine. Is being "atheist" a choice? People don't choose their convictions the same way they choose their clothes. I'm a Christian. Sometimes I wished I weren't, because Christianity is very demanding and because it's low status among my peers. But I'm convinced of its truth for the time being, so whether I like it or not I remain Christian.
Choice or not a choice, 'round these parts, atheism is what Robin Hanson calls the "sacred".
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Yes. The traditional minstrel shows, as I understand it, depicted black people as stupid or foolish etc. But I don't know that that is true of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (though I have never seen the whole movie, so I might be mistaken). Nor it is true of 99% of people who dress in "blackface" nowadays, to play homage to Michael Jackson or whomever.
Then, you really do have an odd definition of "anti-Catholic." The Mormon Church used to teach that blacks were the cursed descendants of Cain and/or Ham; were those who criticized those doctrines therefore "anti-Mormon"? I don't see how.
Isn't that exactly what Martin Luther did? He criticized the Church, but not the religion.
I can see how one might assume that initially. But, if one looked at the website of the organization in question, and saw zero references to Catholicism there, I would think that one would update one's beliefs.
He is respectful all the way through. But I am confused by your confusion on this issue - everyone else in this thread is applying what progressive dogma has demanded for the past decade - if someone in the target group is offended, it's offensive. I don't care enough to go through your history, but I am fairly certain you understood this concept previously.
I have never supported that argument in the least. Among other things, it is contrary to basic principles of freedom of expression.
I didn't say you supported it, I said you understood it.
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It seems like a pretty common belief in the history of Christianity generally, but yes--I have a hard time imagining someone discussing the racist history of Christianity in a way that is pro-Christianity. Perhaps it could be discussed neutrally, as a mere historical curiosity, but you yourself identify these transvestites as doing something to "clearly ridicule Catholicism," and ridicule is not a neutral act. So you're either being disingenuous now, or you are maintaining an untenable distinction between ridiculing something and being "anti-" that thing. And like, if that's really how you're splitting the hair, okay, but it seems a little absurd to me.
To the best of my understanding, his maintenance that there even is a difference was itself anti-Catholic, and history (specifically, the existence of Lutheranism as a competitor meme) seems to bear that out. But I'm not a theologian, so.
Except you yourself already allowed that there is not "zero references" to Catholicism at that website, owing to the caricatured Catholic nuns. This substantially increases my suspicion that you are, in fact, just trolling.
I think the interlocutor is disingenuous but extending charity one explanation could be that the interlocutor has the progressive belief that being anti-X means you hate X.
So for example Mormons teach a lot of things that are wrong. In that way, I’m anti-Mormon because I don’t think it is true. But that doesn’t mean I hate Mormons; it just means I think they are wrong.
But how I go about being anti-Mormon could suggest hatred. If I made a public display of mocking their sacred symbols with an intent to distress them then it is reasonable for me to be described as hateful towards them.
This group is clearly hateful toward Catholics.
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"have a hard time imagining someone discussing the racist history of Christianity in a way that is pro-Christianity."
Are there really only two possibilities? Being either pro- or anti- ? Eg, I am not pro- religion, but neither am I anti-religion in the manner of Richard Dawkins,et al.
That simply restates the initial claim that the mere fact that they dress as nuns is proof that they are "anti-Catholic." If a group that simply does that, and does not in any other way even mention Catholicism, or the Church, is "anti-Catholic," then with enemies like that, apparently the Church doesn't need friends.
Y’all are fighting over semantics. Taboo the phrase “anti-Catholic.” Which of the following propositions do you believe?
Some of the Sisters’ beliefs are not compatible with Christian theology.
The Sisters are mocking Catholic religious practices.
The Sisters are mocking political positions held mainly by Christians.
The Sisters are mocking political positions held by Catholics, but not most other Christians.
The Sisters would like to diminish the political power of Christians in general.
The Sisters would like to diminish the political power of Catholics more than other Christians.
The Sisters would like to actively persecute Catholics via ostracization or violence.
The mockery as per 3. already rises to the level of active persecution.
@naraburns, what about you?
I think 1, 2, 3 and 5 are true, but the rest are not. The Sisters are attacking Catholicism for its brand and availability more than out of any specific enmity. Thus I’d be more likely to call them anti-Christian than specifically anti-Catholic, even though they are clearly mocking Catholics.
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Well, I happen to work in the free speech arena, specifically re K-12 schools. So I deal a lot with book challenges. And I can tell you that the common claim that challenges to books with LGBTQ themes are the result of homophobia are bullshit, because the vast, vast majority of said books are challenged because they have racy scenes or depictions.
So, my answer is yes.
And, btw, I do not think that asking for actual evidence is shoving camels through needles.
That example isn't of somebody being against homosexuality but not homophobic, though. It's not an example of them being against homosexuality at all, just against books with racy scenes being in schools.
OP asked, "Every time someone's accused of homophobia, are you going to step in and shove a camel through the eye of a needle like this?" The example I gave is about people being accused of homophobia, and my response thereto.
Ah, makes sense. I thought you were replying to the first question.
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