Bishop to 21st century

Catholic Bishop Thomas Paparazzi is going to exorcize evil,or the devil, or demons, from Lincolnland this Wednesday at about the same time the Governor signs the gay-marriage bill into law.  Of course Bishop Paparazzi was bleating the usual silliness about the destruction of marriage, religious freedoms, and so on.  This event will demonstrate the power of prayer, a bishop’s prayer no less.  The bill will become a law and gay people will get married, and our dear bishop will have demonstrated the impotence of his prayers.  This assumes that the devil is real, and that demons are real, and that prayer is effective, and evil can be exorcized by certain ancient rights.  Of course, if the bishop really did manage to exorcize evil, how many pedophile priests would disappear from Lincolnland?  At the same time some diocese here abouts was in the news for getting some relic, some piece, a bit of something gross, of a former pope, and thereby worthy of veneration.  Zounds!  Would someone please tell the Catholics what century we’re in?

Same sex marriage in Lincolnland

So far is has not been decided whether Lincolnland will allow same sex marriage or if our state will just stay unconstitutional.  Opponents still out number proponents in the state legislature, so the matter will probably not be brought to a vote anytime soon.  The opponents claim this will have a negative impact on religious liberties, but the only liberty that has the potential to be infringed upon is bigotry.  Even if the measure is passed, gay-bigot denominations would not have to marry any couples they object to, just as now, however, since TPP's church (Unitarian) would marry them, one might ask where is our religious liberty?  The problem here is that marriage exists as both civil and a religious institutions, and no issue shows more clearly why you don't want religion and government to become further entangled. Jocelyn Floyd, special counsel for the Thomas More Society for Religious Bigotry and Science Denialism doesn't seem to know any gay couples because she argues that the primary reason for marriage is too protect children and provide a "cultural environment where children [have] a mother and a father to each offer unique aspects in raising".  Every gay couple TPP knows, and he knows quite a few, provide exactly such cultural environment, and you need only interact with them a short time to figure it out.  At quite a young age our F1 completely understood that while her friend and playmate had two daddies, one of them was really the mommy.  Of course, extending Jocelyn's procreation and parenting reasoning, the marriages of senior citizens have no purpose.  Other zealots warn of the moral collapse of our society, and from what TPP can see their cure is worse than the disease.  One interesting twist here in Lincolnland is that in general black clergy oppose gay marriage showing that they learned very little during the civil rights struggles of my youth, back when interracial marriage was both socially, religiously, and legally outlawed. My students see no problem whatsoever, so our legislators had better wake up; these voters are paying attention.