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The archbishop of the Washington diocese said Easter Sunday that he was concerned that Catholics would be shunned for opposing same sex marriage -- and that it was gay and lesbian Americans who need to "make room" for the very people discriminating against them.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Cardinal Donald Wuerl how the church would react to gay and lesbian members who wanted to get married if the U.S. Supreme Court found that state and federal bans on same sex marriage were unconstitutional.

"The Catholic Church also reminds all of us there is a moral law, they are the commandments of God and we have to do our best to live by them," Wuerl insisted. "The church is probably -- with 20 centuries of experience -- the most understanding of the human condition of any institution. But at the same time, it does remind not only gay people but heterosexual people, straight people, you're not supposed to be following a moral law apart from what Christ has said to us."

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Bill Maher let his audience know what he thought of the Catholic church just making up their own sets of "new rules" over the years during his New Rules segment on Real Time this Friday evening.

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Republican Nebraska state Sen. Mark Christensen says that a fellow lawmaker might go to hell because "he doesn’t have the relationship that it takes to be a Christian or go to Heaven" after filibustering a bill that would expand prison work camps to provide labor for nonprofit organizations.

Sen. Ernie Chambers (I) shut down the legislative process for hours on Wednesday with his filibuster of Christensen's Legislative Bill 52, which allows inmates at the McCook Work Ethic Camp to provide labor for "any charitable, fraternal, or nonprofit corporation."

During his hours-long filibuster, Chambers blasted former Republican Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy, who recently resigned after a paper revealed that he had made thousands of phone calls to women who were not his wife. Chambers was also critical of the Nebraska attorney general because he let former Sen. Brenda Council (D) off with a misdemeanor after she gambled more than $63,000 in campaign funds at casinos.

"Sheehy and Council commit crimes but aren’t charged," Chambers said, noting that "some scruffy person" would not be so lucky, according to the Nebraska Watchdog.

“Why shouldn’t Sheehy be sentenced to do some free labor?” he wondered. “It would teach him good work habits, and it would let him know that crime of any kind doesn’t pay.”

Chambers -- who once sued God for causing "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like" -- continued his filibuster by going after the hypocrisy of Republican Christians because they had “taken people’s wives” and “shiver of shivers, engaged in homosexuality.”

At one point, Chambers noted that Jesus “looked more like me than you all.”

The state senator observed that the Mafia had higher standards than the Catholic Church because if made men were “raping children, they’d off them.”

The filibuster was shut down when the legislative session ended at noon on Wednesday.

Following the session, Christensen told the Watchdog that Chambers filibustered because thought the prison work plan was reminiscent of “chain gang days.”

“He knows the Bible but he doesn’t have the relationship that it takes to be a Christian or go to Heaven,” Christensen added.

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The second Roman Catholic Bishop of San Jose on Sunday personally apologized to parishioners for giving a convicted child molester permission to work at a parish festival last month.

Bishop Patrick McGrath appeared at Saint Frances Cabrini Mass and told the congregation called it was an "an unfortunate circumstance" that pedophile Mark Gurries was provided a letter which gave him permission to volunteer at the Saint Frances Cabrini parish festival, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

"I take full responsibility," McGrath said. "I pledge to you I will do everything in my power to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Gurries had served a year in jail for "lewd and lascivious conduct" with a minor under 14. He is currently on probation.

Melanie Borrelli, 19, had noticed Gurries at the festival because she was friends with the victim. Borrelli's father asked police to remove Gurries from the event, but they could not arrest him because California law allows sex offenders on school property if they have a written letter of permission from the school administrator.

In an open letter posted on the Diocese of San Jose website, McGrath explained that the letter had been a "mistake."

"Our policy is clear: no one who has been found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor or vulnerable adult can be hired as an employee or allowed to volunteer in any activity that involves children, young people, or vulnerable adults," he wrote. "How this happened is still a matter of continuing investigation on the diocesan level. Even before that investigation is concluded, I want to assure you that we will never knowingly allow such an occurrence to be repeated in the Diocese of San Jose."

(h/t: NBC News)

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A Catholic bishop from Springfield, Illinois is warning that the stakes for the 2012 election are even higher than most people think because voting for President Barack Obama could damn "you own soul" to hell.

In a column and video posted by the official newspaper of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois and obtained by Right Wing Watch on Wednesday, Bishop Thomas John Paprocki called out the Democratic Party for temporarily removing God from their platform, supporting abortion and recognizing that "gay rights are human rights."

"There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils," the bishop explained. "My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding 'political' and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins."

"So what about the Republicans? I have read the Republican Party Platform and there is nothing in it that supports or promotes an intrinsic evil or a serious sin," Paprocki added. "One might argue for different methods in the platform to address the needs of the poor, to feed the hungry and to solve the challenges of immigration, but these are prudential judgments about the most effective means of achieving morally desirable ends, not intrinsic evils."

"Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against," he concluded, "but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy."

(h/t: Pam's House Blend)

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Lawrence O'Donnell hit Ayn Rand fan-boy and now Mitt Romney presidential running mate Rep. Paul Ryan for his romance with Rand that he's been trying to run away from for some time now. As O'Donnell noted, there are two reasons for Ryan trying to distance himself from his hero. One is the Catholic Church going after him for supporting her philosophy and the other was the fact that he was being considered as a running mate for Romney.

O'Donnell went after Ryan for trying to play dumb during his interview with Brit Hume on Fox News this Tuesday evening on Baier's show. During his time with Hume lobbing softballs at him, Ryan pretended he was a fan of Rand's, until he realized what her philosophy was. As we've shown here in post after post and as O'Donnell pointed out, that change had to have happened very recently because as late as 2009 he was still singing her praises: Paul Ryan Tries Keeping Up With Etch-a-Sketch Mitt By Pretending His Ayn Rand Fandom Is an 'Urban Legend'.

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A conservative radio host says that the Catholic nuns who have embarked on a nine-state bus tour to protest the injustice of Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) proposed budget deserve to be beaten with a handgun because they "threw the first punch."

"There’s a bus full of nuns headed towards Washington to lobby against the Ryan plan," radio host Jan Mickelson told Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) last week. "Do you guys, do you have any power to pull the nuns on the bus over and pistol whip them?"

"They say he is evil, they say he is fake Catholic," he added. "They're the ones that threw the first punch."

A Vatican report also recently criticized the nuns for focusing too much on the Catholic Church's message about social and economic justice instead of spending time opposing abortion and marriage equality.

"When we got named [by the Vatican], there was like an explosion of support," Simone Campbell told Al Jazeera English last week. "So when we had all of this opportunity, all of this exposure, all of this attention — nuns aren’t used to having a lot of attention on themselves — so, it was like, oh my gosh, we need to use this for the sake of people at the margin."

The non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that nearly two-thirds of the cuts proposed in Ryan’s budget would be to programs serving low-income Americans, while the his tax cuts would largely benefit millionaires. People making more than $1 million a year would see a 12.5 percent increase in after-tax income but those making less than $20,000 would see an decrease of 0.2 percent or less.

(h/t: Addicting Info)

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Last month, we had The Catholic League's Bill Donohue going after Hilary Rosen in an extremely ugly attack because she dared to commit the sin, in Donohue's mind, of being a lesbian with adopted children after the big dust up over her statement about Ann Romney. Because god knows you're only supposed to be allowed to raise children if you're straight. Now he's on the attack again over HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius being invited to speak at a Georgetown University commencement ceremony.

Donohue went over a similar set of grievances that he expressed to Megyn Kelly in the clip above in a post on their web site here: Kathleen Sebelius to Speak at Georgetown Commencement Ceremony:

In what can only be interpreted as a direct challenge to America’s Catholic bishops, Georgetown University has announced that “pro-choice” Catholic Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and lead architect of the Obama administration’s assault on religious freedom through the HHS contraception mandate, has been invited to speak at one of Georgetown’s several commencement ceremonies.

The Cardinal Newman Society has posted a petition to protest this outrage here: GeorgetownScandal.com. It has also alerted Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl and sent a letter to Georgetown President John DeGioia urging him to immediately withdraw the invitation. [...]

The nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university has chosen to honor Sebelius by granting her a prestigious platform at its Public Policy Institute commencement ceremony, despite her role as the lead architect of a healthcare mandate that will force Catholic institutions to pay for contraception, abortifacients and sterilization against their religious beliefs. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has termed the mandate “an unwarranted government definition of religion” that is “alien both to our Catholic tradition and to federal law,” “a violation of personal civil rights” and “a mandate to act against our teachings.”

But Secretary Sebelius’ record on abortion is at least as troubling as the mandate. When Governor of Kansas, Sebelius supported abortion rights and vetoed pro-life legislation. In 2008, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City reportedly told Sebelius, a Roman Catholic, to stop receiving the Eucharist until she publicly recants her position on abortion and makes a “worthy sacramental confession.”

During the interview above, Donohue also claimed that Sebelius may have been excommunicated and "her best friend was George the killer Tiller," referencing of course the now assassinated abortion doctor who is no longer with us today, thanks in part to the flame throwing by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and his ilk.

And as Think Progress noted of this same interview: Catholic League President Compares Pro-Choice Groups To Neo-Nazis:

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How pitiful is it that anyone is still out there trying to pretend like this whole argument over women's reproductive health and access to affordable birth control is a matter of "religious liberty?" That's exactly what former Cheney adviser Mary Matalin was doing during one of Anderson Cooper's little "fair and balanced" debates this Thursday night on CNN.

Hilary Rosen was exactly right when she said this in response to Matalin's hand wringing for the Catholic bishops:

ROSEN: The only thing that they seem to, you know, want to take to the streets on is something that discriminates against women who don't agree with the men in the church.

If Mary Matalin wants to convince anyone that it's not Republicans that have been on a jihad against women's reproductive health over the last few decades, and really aggressively over the last few years, she's going to have to do a better job than she did here.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says an amendment put forward by Senate Republicans that would have allowed any business to exclude contraceptives from health care plans was not really about birth control.

"The Blunt amendment was broader than that," Santorum told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. "It was a conscience clause exception that existed prior to when President Obama decided that he could impose his values on people of faith, when people of faith believe that this is a grievous moral wrong."

"But the Blunt Amendment wasn't just talking about Catholic institutions -- Catholic colleges, charities -- it was saying any -- you know, U.S. Steel -- any company, any insurance company could decide not to offer birth control," Wallace noted.

"No, it wasn't about birth control," Santorum, who is Catholic, insisted. "It was about a moral exception to any type of mandate. ... We hear so much about the left wanting to separate church and state. Well, how about the separation of church and state when the state wants to force the church and people who are believers into doing something that they don't want to do."

Last week, the anti-contraception amendment sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) was in a 51-48 vote.

Wallace went on to press Santorum on whether he still believes that the 99 percent of all women in the U.S. who had used birth control had done something wrong.

"I'm reflecting the views of the Church that I believe in," the former Pennsylvania senator replied. "We used to be tolerant of those beliefs. I guess now when you have beliefs that are consistent with the church, you are somehow out of touch with the mainstream. And that to me is a pretty sad situation when you can't have personally-held beliefs."