Why can’t they just stay in their damned churches and keep their debates about how many angels can circle jerk on the head of a pederast priest’s cock to themselves?

Another skirmish between religious progressives and the religious left has broken out. The group Catholics for Choice, which supports abortion rights, has come out against the appointment of a progressive Catholic activist to direct the federal Health and Human Services Department’s faith-based office.

The new HHS faith-based director, Alexia Kelley, is certainly not a hard-core conservative. An adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, she has since led the progressive Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which has came under attack from the conservative Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights for its messaging around abortion.

“The Catholic Church believes that every human life—whether young or old, guilty or innocent, born or unborn—is both precious and sacred,” Catholics in Alliance says on its website. “It remains as the foundation for all principles and elements of social teaching.” But the group is more focused on social justice issues like fighting poverty and has promoted ways to reduce abortion that avoid curtailing abortion rights.

Excuse me, but that IS a “hard-core conservative” position.

Catholics for Choice’s president, Jon O’Brien, has issued a withering attack on Kelley’s appointment because of her apparent support for some abortion restrictions. An excerpt:

From the beginning, Alexia Kelley directed CACG to ignore the question of access to abortion and reframe the debate in terms of reducing the number of abortions—although polls consistently show that the majority of Catholics support abortion rights. This language around reducing the number of abortions should be a huge red flag to anyone who believes in and seeks to defend a woman’s right to choose. While evidence-based prevention methods can go a long way towards reducing the need for abortion, some women will always need access to safe and legal abortion and we must recognize that and ensure public policies support that access.

Alexia Kelley is on record with her support for restrictions on access to abortion, despite her organization’s efforts to avoid the question of legalization at every turn. In an audio press conference prior to the 2008 election, Ms. Kelley agreed with other speakers who spoke out in favor of restrictions on abortion, saying, “Catholics in Alliance supports these restrictions as well.”

It’s bad enough that the permagov allows a movement of religious zealots to murder healthcare providers with impunity for years, and that one of the permagov’s sanctioned political parties has long been the province of those religious nuts, but now the OTHER party has to elevate them too?

Why isn’t heaven enough? Why isn’t it enough for them to know they have the Truth, that their warm and fuzzy, angry and authoritarian, fatherly and judgemental, forgiving and slaughtering God is going to grant them life forever in Paradise?

Why can’t they leave the rest of us alone? It’s bad enough that they subject their children to narrow-minded superstitions, not to mention molestors, that some of them would rather let their children die than take them to a doctor.

No, that’s not enough.

It’s not enough that the rest of us will rot forever, or burn forever, or be tortured forever in their imagined afterlife … no, they have to muck around in other people’s lives, tell the rest of us which of our wives, lovers, daughters, mothers and sisters get to live or die because they’ve made it impossible for them to access the reproductive healthcare when they needed it. They get to tell who some of us get to love, who we can commit to … all because their Imaginary Friend “told” them so.

It’s bad enough, but now they have to run BOTH political parties? Not that there is much difference between the parties already, not that our entire ruling class, wearing donkey mask or elephant mask, doesn’t spend most of our tax dollars on endless war and the ever-expanding for-profit prison system … but at least one of them used to pretend that grifters wearing vestments were supposed to be kept away from the government. Okay, maybe just be less aggressive about the god bothering, the scolding and book burning and woman stoning, but at least there was one ostensibly “secular” party.

Why isn’t heaven enough for these people? Why can’t the obsess about their own sex lives, their own moral quandaries, their own fucked up lives … why must they condemn women to pain and death in the name of an arbrary standard based upon a fairly recent interpretation of a bunch of old fables?

A better question … why do women who call themselves liberal or progressive VOTE for this fraud in the White House and the rest of that con known as the Democratic Party? For that matter, why do GBLT people support a party that promises them support only to file homophobic cant like their recent DOMA court brief? How many lies to you need to be told while you watch President Born Again Ivy League Messiah stab you in the back over and over again?

Maybe when his pet religious nuts are gathered together with President Barry about how to screw over the Democratic Party’s supposed base they AREN’T arguing how many angels can circle jerk on the head of a pederast priest’s cock, but rather how many times they can screw the rubes over and still rake in the votes and campaign contributions. History does show that when the pious get together they spend much more time on counting the gold they’ve gathered in the collection plates than they do on making people’s lives better, especially if they’re women. President Barry is in on that con, running it hard, and it’s only going to get worse.