Times: Love at Confused.com

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121225/blogs/love-at-confused-com.450900
Tuesday, December 25, 2012, 11:45 by Alison Bezzina

I tried to wait it out, I really, really did.

I tried with all my might to let the Christmas season go by without commenting about the Pope’s latest attack on gay marriage....you know the one in which he unceremoniously says that gays are people who manipulate their God-given gender to suit their sexual choices.

Yes, sad as it may sound, just a few days before Christmas 2012, the Prada bearing Pope still thinks it’s a choice to be gay.

But anyway, as incredulous and angry as this made me feel, I had been drinking enough festive wine to be able to let it go...at least until after the holidays, but, every time I went out to celebrate the birth of Jesus around a pagan tree, friends colluded to pressure me into writing something about it.

So many (and this is not an exaggeration) begged me to put their feelings of Papal shock into words, and when I resisted, (in the name of the festive season), they explained that if they had to try to put their thoughts into words themselves, all that would come out would be gibberish foul language. They told me that I was their only hope to let the Pope know exactly where to get off.

But I resisted... until Christmas morning.

That’s when I woke up and reached for my phone because it was already blaring and beeping with all kinds of Christmas messages. Quickly I skipped to this paper’s website and the first story was about our dear Archbishop’s Christmas message.

Nothing new right? Very predictable actually. It is after all, the biggest feast for Christianity.

Then, against my better judgement, I went on to read the gist of what it said. Through a half open eyelid, and mascara-blurred eyesight, I read that according to Archbishop Cremona “if, in spite of the fact that you are a citizen, you are suffering ... or you endure some form of injustice, then your citizenship is not worth much.”

Believe me, it took me more than a minute for me to get my breath back because this came only couple of days after the Archbishop’s big boss, also known as Pope Benedict XVI, said that by loving each other and wanting to be married, gay men and women are destroying the very "essence of the human creature," and that “...they deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."

So which one is it I wonder?

Who’s right and who’s wrong?

Is this a serious case of the right hand not knowing what the left one is doing? Or is it a weak attempt at veiling hypocrisy?

I mean they can’t both be right, right?

On the one hand, our Archbishop is telling our political leaders that “they should do their utmost to ensure that any benefits emanating from their country and the European Union are available to one and all, and that nobody is marginalised for any reason whatsoever,” and on the other, the Pope thinks that gay men and women who want to get married are a threat to world peace.

It is physically, morally, ethically and practically impossible to adhere to both the Pope’s and Archbishop’s messages, so which one will it be?