“Whoops, bit of politics, LIKE IT!”

…in the words of Ben Elton, back when he was arguably a cutting-edge stand up and before he sold out to do “The Thin Blue Line” or such abba-rations as “We Will Rock You”. Up until now I have kept this blog almost exclusively for news of a personal or regional nature, so as to avoid any chance of alienating our few readers. But I read an international news story yesterday which brought my blood to the temperatures of fiery hell itself, and which I fear I cannot allow to pass without my own opinionated commentary. Almost needless to say, it involves religion.
Andy Hamilton writes and acts in a fantastic radio sitcom/satire called “Old Harry’s Game”, in which he entertainingly plays Satan. The plotline is that hell has become too full so the Prince of Darkness now walks the earth trying to persuade people to live better lives and hence send their souls upstairs. It seems that the Vatican are operating a slightly amended version of this in which they simply try to get souls into the afterlife as early as possible.

Let’s not rush this: First there was the whole thing with condoms (and even the hole thing with condoms, but more on that story later). One day the Pope awoke having had the revelation that this kind of contraception was a bad thing. Let’s be clear, the bible says nothing about condoms. I mean you can believe or disbelieve what’s in it but it says precisely the same thing about condoms as it does about jet aircraft, mp3 players and Sesame Street. They had not been invented so anything which can be construed to relate to them in the bible is pure speculation and extrapolation. But his holiness decided they were bad and should not be used in any circumstances, and the Vatican stuck to this line while it accelerated the spread of HIV throughout this continent, at a cost of literally millions of human lives. There was even a rumour put about during the time of the previous pope, JPII, that condoms (should you choose to damn yourself by using them) didn’t even work, owing to their being riddled with more holes than his beloved Warsaw FC’s back four. This is plainly not true, latex is impermeable to more or less anything, including human gametes and the HIV virus. But the rumour received widespread credence from a gullible press – much like the MMR vaccine nonsense that harmed British children more recently. And more serious journalists than I have traced the sequence of news stories and events to find that the latex lie originated in, you guessed it, the Catholic Church.

Back to 2009 and the reign of a new Pope, who, lest we forget, was a member of the Nazi party. Maybe we shouldn’t hold that against him as many people were at the time, and it would have taken great moral courage and strength to refuse to sign up. Oh, hang on… Anyway, the current incumbent of this role began with a token step towards righting some wrongs by stating that condoms were actually forgivable if they were being used to prevent disease rather than to prevent pregnancy. The ongoing suffering caused by the planet’s unsustainable over-population clearly still not an issue, but it was a (little and late) step towards slowing what is probably the greatest pandemic in human history.

And so on to this week’s news story. I can only imagine that the man upstairs has had a quiet word in Benedict’s shell-like about how they’re not seeing enough death these days, and St Peter has too much time on his hands. Desperate to avoid any further redundancies amongst the angelic horde, the Vatican has now come out and tried to block a UN scheme which would make clean hypodermics and more frequent health checks available to drug addicts. This is a scheme which would undoubtedly save lives. The perverse “logic” behind opposing this measure is (and this must have taken some imagination to dream up, and the control of a Saint to deliver such a statement straight-faced) that it is a liberalisation of drug policy, and could be seen as condoning drug use. This is much like saying cars should not be allowed to have brakes as this could be seen as condoning speeding.
With or without clean needles, injecting drug users will die an unhappy death, most of them sooner rather than later. But if this health promotion project is scuppered by a superstitious minority, then another wave of wives, husbands and children (I should probably say orphans) will one day be told that, through no fault of their own, they have contracted an incurable and deadly disease. But I’ve misinterpreted things, as the Pope is of course infallible.