Have you noticed how the fascists are obsessed with Catholic teaching on sexuality?

Why do they care what the Church teaches her adherents? Could it be they think silencing the Church [or corrupting it so it will be like them] will silence the cries of their consciences?
 
First, the skinny from the truth tellers:

Archbishop Chaput: Pope Francis shows continuity on divorce, so-called remarriage 

 Philadelphia, Pa., Jul 7, 2016 / 03:25 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis’ teaching on divorce-and-remarriage and the sacraments represents Catholic tradition and shows the way forward for engaging those who are estranged and hurting, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has said.

“As with all magisterial documents, Amoris Laetitia is best understood when read within the tradition of the Church’s teaching and life,” Archbishop Chaput said in July 1 pastoral guidelines for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

Amoris Laetitia is Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation written as a culmination of the 2015 Synod on the Family. Some vague language in the exhortation had allowed a variety of interpretations, and Archbishop Chaput's guidelines were meant to help in the implementation of the document in the Philadelphia archdiocese.

“The Holy Father himself states clearly that neither Church teaching nor the canonical discipline concerning marriage has changed,” the archbishop said. “The Holy Father’s exhortation should therefore be read in continuity with the great treasury of wisdom handed on by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the witness of the lives of the saints, the teachings of Church councils, and previous magisterial documents.”

Read that again, kiddies.

The archbishop said the exhortation, which includes “sections of exceptional beauty and usefulness”, calls for “a sensitive accompaniment” for those whose grasp of Christian teaching on marriage and family life is imperfect and for those who may not live according to Church teaching but desire to take part in Church life, including the Sacraments.

“In all of this the Holy Father, in union with the whole Church, hopes to strengthen existing families, and to reach out to those whose marriages have failed, including those alienated from the life of the Church,” he added.

Pope Francis' statements, he said, “build on the classic Catholic understanding, key to moral theology, of the relationship between objective truth about right and wrong … and how the individual person grasps and applies that truth to particular situations in his or her judgment of conscience.” 

He recalled that “the subjective conscience of the individual can never be set against objective moral truth,” and quoted several times from Veritatis splendor, St. John Paul II's 1993 encyclical on fundamental questions regarding the Church's moral teaching.

Archbishop Chaput considered how this applies in cases of divorced-and-remarried persons, cohabiting couples, and persons with same-sex attractions or relationships.

“With divorced and civilly-remarried persons, Church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy,” he explained. “This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof. Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which could then open the way to the Eucharist.”

Pastors should avoid “both a subjectivism that ignores the truth or a rigorism that lacks mercy,” he said. They must always convey Catholic teaching “faithfully to all persons – including the divorced and remarried – both in the confessional as well as publicly.”
“They should do this with great confidence in the power of God’s grace, knowing that, when spoken with love, the truth heals, builds up, and sets free,” he added.

Archbishop Chaput said pastors who give Communion to divorced-and-remarried persons who try to live chastely must take care to avoid the appearance of endorsement of divorce-and-remarriage.
“As Amoris Laetitia notes, bishops must arrange for the accompaniment of estranged and hurting persons with guidelines that faithfully reflect Catholic belief,” he said, citing paragraph 300 of the Pope’s document.

That passage stressed careful discernment that does not avoid “the gospel demands of truth and charity, as proposed by the Church.” It stressed the need for “humility, discretion, and love for the Church and her teaching” for discernment for those in irregular marital situations.

The divorced-and-remarried are invited to attend Mass, pray, and take part in parish activities. Their children should be brought up in the faith and are “integral to the life of the Catholic community.”
Cohabiting couples without children should domestically separate to prepare themselves for marriage. Those with children may have to live together, for the children’s sake, “but in chastity.”

For those with same-sex attractions, Church ministers should emphasize “that they are loved by God, that Jesus desires them to receive an inheritance as adopted sons and daughters of the Father, and that, as with every Christian, this is made possible through the gift of grace,” Archbishop Chaput said. 

Given Christian teaching on marriage and sexual intimacy, those with same-sex attractions are “called to struggle to live chastely for the kingdom of God.”

For same-sex couples, the archbishop noted the importance of remembering that some couples “live together in chaste friendship.”

“The Church welcomes all men and women who honestly seek to encounter the Lord, whatever their circumstances,” he said. “But two persons in an active, public same-sex relationship, no matter how sincere, offer a serious counter-witness to Catholic belief, which can only produce moral confusion in the community. Such a relationship cannot be accepted into the life of the parish without undermining the faith of the community, most notably the children.”

Archbishop Chaput noted the “great suffering” of those who are separated or divorced.

There is no obstacle to receiving Holy Communion for those who recognize that their first marriage is indissoluble and refrain from a new union. Indeed, they should receive the sacraments regularly, he noted.

“God is faithful to them even when their spouses are not, a truth that fellow Catholics should reinforce,” he said.

Archbishop Chaput repeated that marriage is permanent, monogamous, and open to life.

“Jesus himself raised marriage to new dignity,” he said. “The valid marriage of two baptized persons is a sacrament that confers grace, with the potential to deepen the couple’s life in Christ, especially through the shared privilege of bringing new life into the world and raising children in the knowledge of God.”

The archbishop stressed the great joy of marriage, acknowledging its stresses and suffering while also praising the grace of the sacrament, which can “strengthen [the couple's] relationship, not just as an idea but as a reality that impacts their daily married life.”
One prominent Catholic objected to the archbishop’s presentation of Catholic teaching. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on Twitter snapped that Archbishop Chaput’s actions “are not Christian.”

Kenney is a fat commie douchebag who is most famous for his soda tax. He is also a noted Catholic From The Waist Up.

 I was going to present the other side, but who wants to hear the advocates of mortal sin and eternal damnation?

The problem with the current pope is his naivete [I'm being charitable.] Even hinting that individual priests can declare a mortal sin not a mortal sin is ridiculous and he knows it. More likely, Francis is infected with the spirit of this benighted age, aggravated by remnants of "liberation theology". [If you don't know the term, think of the Gospels as if they were written by the Castro brothers. It was big in left-fascist circles in the 1970s and 1980s.]

This is the same inhuman [Yes, I said inhuman. I choose my words carefully, kiddies.] thinking that turned an innocuous Church document known as Vatican II into a revolution aimed at destroying the One, True Church and sending millions of souls to Hell.

Ideas have consequences, kiddies, and all priests need to know that some ideas are truly diabolical.

For you poor protestant bastards mired in the cesspool of moral relativism, here are some Words of God that will hopefully heal your minds and hearts...

From  CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA:

The inadmissibility of absolute divorce was ordained by Christ Himself according to the testimony of the Apostles and Evangelists: "Whoever shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery" (Mark 10:11, 12 — Cf. Matthew 19:9; Luke 16:18). In like manner, St. Paul: "To them that are married, not I but the Lord commandeth, that the wife depart not from her husband. And if she depart, she remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband. And let not the husband put away his wife" (1 Corinthians 7:10, 11). In these words Christ restored the original indissolubility of marriage as it had been ordained by God in the Creation and was grounded in human nature. This is expressly stated by Him against the Pharisees, who put forward the separation allowed by Moses: "Moses by reason of hardness of your heart permitted you to put away your wives": but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8); "He who made man from the beginning, made them male and female. And he said: For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they two shall be in one flesh. Therefore now they are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder" (Matthew 19:4-6). The indissolubility of all marriage, not merely of Christian marriage, is here affirmed. The permanence of marriage for the whole human race according to natural law is here confirmed and ratified by a Divine positive ordinance.

The summer doldrums continue apace. [Damn, I miss those zombie stories.]

Ack! I can't believe I feel compelled to notice the NBA for a second day in a row. but now the same idiots are whining about Dwayne Wade leaving Miami.


Look, kiddies, sport is a business. Even big-time college sports is a business. If you don't understand that, you are either a dumbass, are under thirteen years of age, or you work in "sports media".

If Mr. Wade wants to go elsewhere for more money, that's ok. It is up to him. If he would have stayed in Miami so he could finish out his career with just one team, that would be just as ok. He's a grown man making a business decision. Sentiment has nothing to do with it.

Speaking of which, what exactly does staying in one town for your whole life get you?  If you're lucky you get to open a steak house or a car dealership with your name on it. 

The reaction to Kevin Durant's move is proof that many people are shits.

Seriously, kiddies, I know it is tough to get excited about NBA free agency, but that's all we have at the moment. [Don't you just yearn for the excitement of the playoffs and LeBron getting swatted in the fellas?] 

All the hypocritical talking pricks at ESPN and all the digital troglodytes on twitter are still bitching about Durant playing for Golden State now when we all know if he had stayed in OKC, they'd have killed him for being all about the money.

Good luck, Mr. Durant, and pay absolutely no attention to those who claim to be your moral and intellectual superiors. Haters will always hate the player and the game because it is the only way they can get noticed.

What part of total fascist control don't you understand?

"Move along you serfs. There's nothing to see here. Absolutely nothing, you here me?"

From The Fiscal Times:

FBI’s Comey Makes It Clear: Hillary Clinton Is Above the Law

 

Is Hillary Clinton innocent? Or did she manage to avoid indictment? The two are not the same, as FBI Director James Comey made clear, even as he decided against recommending that Clinton be prosecuted for mishandling state secrets.

About half the country will now conclude what it has long suspected: the Clintons are above the law. How else to interpret Comey’s announcement?

Comey revealed his decision today, just in time to let Clinton hit the campaign trail with President Obama. And, just days after former president Bill Clinton happened to bump into Justice Department chief Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. What a happy coincidence — allowing the two old pals to catch up on the joys of grandparenting.

Related: Under Fire, Lynch Removes Herself from Final Decision on Clinton Email

It is difficult not to be cynical about the sequence of events. Unhappily, given the multiple occurrences of corruption in the Obama White House (see: Lois Lerner, Fast & Furious, etc.) and the innumerable scandals that have engulfed the Clintons over several decades, cynicism is quite appropriate.

Let’s consider Comey’s conclusions. Most curious is that he judges Clinton and her aides to have been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Nonetheless, he declines to prosecute her for “gross negligence” in the handling of classified information, which is a felony. How Clintonian to find airspace between those two standards.

As Comey said, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” In other words, Clinton broke the law, but the evidence is not solid enough to indict. Is that the issue? Or were the straight arrow Comey and his FBI deterred by the calamitous political fallout of charging the presumed Democratic nominee for president with a felony.

Related: Extremely Proud to Be an American? Fewer People Say They Are

Most fair-minded people will believe that Clinton purposefully hid her correspondence. It turns out, as Comey noted, that the former secretary of state employed not one personal email server, but several. When she shifted from one to another, large caches of emails disappeared.

Specifically, Comey said, “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored and decommissioned in various ways.”

The FBI laboriously tried to reassemble much of what was destroyed, with only partial success. Remember that public officials are supposed to preserve their work-related correspondence for posterity; Clinton did not.

That Clinton lied repeatedly about her personal server use is a fact. She said she never sent or received classified information. To the contrary, Comey notes that “From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department [from Clinton’s server] 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received…For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received.”

In true Clintonian fashion, Hillary would have us believe that classified emails sent to her were “not marked” as such; Comey blows that line out of the water arguing that “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”

Related: Big Winners in the Trump-Clinton Race: Hatred and Voter Disgust

That mishandling such information is against the law is a fact. Comey referenced the “federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.”

It is also worrisome; there’s a reason officials are meant to use secure communications systems. As Comey noted: “None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at departments and agencies of the U.S. government — or even with a commercial service like Gmail.” At the least, the infractions prove Clinton’s judgment appalling.

Clinton also lied about those 30,000 personal emails she claimed concerned matters such as her yoga classes and Chelsea’s wedding. Comey: “The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain.” Not only did Clinton lie about those emails, in destroying them she broke a law.

Some will draw parallels between Chief Justice John Roberts’ surprising decision to uphold Obamacare and Comey’s decision on Clinton. Both may have decided that it was more important to prevent massive political upheaval than to follow the letter of the law. Comey himself gave us some sense of that, when he said, “To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.”

Related: Clinton’s VP List May Have Just Gotten a Little Shorter

Individuals, for instance, like Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier, who was indicted recently for taking cell phone pictures of the engine room of his submarine — even though the government agreed he had no intention of sending the photos to anyone. In a case that many contrasted with the Clinton investigation, Saucier was expected to serve several years in prison for having mishandled national defense information.

So Comey let Clinton off the hook, even as he accused her of breaking the law. Let us hope that voters come November do not follow his lead.

Pennsylvania is a battleground state once again.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Keep those eyes on bellwethers Ohio and Pennsylvania 

Perception and reality are two different things in politics.

On paper, Republicans Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio should be losing in the polls in their U.S. Senate re-election races. 

Both men have been hammered for a month over whether they will support their party's presumptive nominee, their opposition to voting on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and their refusal to enact new gun legislation after the massacre in Orlando. 

Yet both are defying conventional political wisdom. 

Toomey increased his lead over Democrat Katie McGinty by 8 percentage points in the latest Quinnipiac survey. 

Portman's numbers improved by 9 points, placing him in a tie with Democrat Ted Strickland, a former governor who lost his re-election bid to John Kasich in 2010. 

The two Republicans are competing in critical states that offer insight into whether Democrats can regain House and Senate majorities in November. 

In short, if you want to know who will hold or retake the Senate majority, watch Toomey's battle with McGinty and Portman's with Strickland. 

As for control of the House, watch what's happening with congressional races in these two Rust Belt states. 

Ohio and Pennsylvania are microcosms of the Democrats' national difficulties in trying to win the House, said Kyle Kondik, author of “The Bellwether: Why Ohio Picks the President” and manager of the University of Virginia's Crystal Ball, the respected online political website. 

“Democrats have a path to the House majority but the Republican advantage in Ohio and Pennsylvania helps illustrate their challenges,” Kondik said. 

Republicans control 12 of 16 House seats in Ohio and 13 of 18 in Pennsylvania — overwhelming majorities in two states that Obama won twice and that, at the moment, Democrat Hillary Clinton is favored to win in November, despite close polling against Republican Donald Trump. 

In Ohio, Democrats don't really have credible targets, according to Kondik. Rep. David Joyce in Ohio's 14th Congressional District is vulnerable “on paper, but after Joyce won his primary, there's not much buzz about that race.” 

In Pennsylvania, Democrats hope to win Bucks County's open 8th District seat, which is the kind of competitive suburban seat they need to win back the House. “Realistically, they don't have much of a chance for any additional gains,” Kondik said. 

Before 2010, Democrats held a healthy majority of House seats in both states but lost five in each state to that year's GOP wave. 

Voters were dissatisfied with government overreach; the moderate Democrats who easily won those seats in 2006 — such as Patrick Murphy in Bucks and Jason Altmire in Western Pennsylvania — lost when their leadership forced them into votes that went against their districts' more traditional, more moderate values. 

There has been much speculation over the impact Trump will have on Republicans' congressional majorities, and much speculation that his awful months of May and June would show him sliding in both states' polls. 

Surprisingly, he didn't slide. In fact, in the same Quinnipiac survey showing Toomey and Portman gaining traction, Trump held steady.

“If Trump wins Ohio and Pennsylvania, Portman and Toomey should also win,” Kondik predicts. “But if Trump loses both states — and especially if he loses them badly (by more than five points) — both incumbents are in trouble.” 

Kondik's Crystal Ball has shifted Pennsylvania's rating in the presidential contest a bit toward Trump. That moves 2016's potentially most important state from “Likely Democratic” to “Leans Democratic,” despite the organizational and 2-to-1 voter-registration advantages Clinton holds in the state. 

Despite the political theatre of House Democrats staging their “sit-in” last week, Americans have grown weary of Washington spectacles and blame-shifting. So instead of appearing to care about gun legislation, Democrats came across as caring all about themselves, knowing nothing would come of their stunt and trying to benefit from it by fundraising off it. 

History shows that you cannot produce a wave election; such events evolve from the bottom up. 

Although anything could happen between now and November, the best way to see which party appears likely to win House and Senate majorities is to keep your eyes on Pennsylvania and Ohio — and to keep your eyes off the contrived spectacles. 

Salena Zito covers politics for the Tribune-Review (szito@tribweb.com).