When the Homily is about Immunology

Patriarch "assails" gays

as·sail
1. To attack with or as if with violent blows; assault.
2. To attack verbally, as with ridicule or censure.

Story here.

So if someone stands up and says "Obesity is an epidemic in America", do I feel like I am being assailed? I mean, I COULD argue that I am genetically predisposed to be obese. Who is the American Medical Association to say that we fat people are "abnormal"? What a hurtful thing to say. Of course, I don't believe this...I recognize and struggle with the fact that my drive to eat and eat is directly related to an illness of the soul more so than it MIGHT be related to a particular nucleotide in my genome.

Anyway I don't understand how making a moral judgment necessarily implies anything with regard to political rights. Just today I hear a story about how obesity is driving medical costs up in America (of course you don't ever hear about STD's and HIV driving medical costs up, but they do too and they are illnesses DIRECTLY correlated with behavior), but I don't count the moral judgment inherent in this bit of news as being a call for infringing upon my "human rights."

One does have to look around to find more details about what was REALLY being communicated here: However, he insisted that no state power should interfere with an individual's personal life, saying: "After all, being moral or immoral is a matter of free personal choice."

Ahhh...so how is it the Patriarch is being "aggressively intolerant" or in anyway insisting that this is not true: "homosexuals and lesbians have human rights and their dignity should be respected"? I, for one, am profoundly weary of the term "intolerant", people toss it around all the time and is quickly becoming an easy way to be intolerant, ironically. One can be tolerant and STILL disagree. Read it again: One can be tolerant and STILL disagree. However, more and more we are defining the term to mean that we are in complete agreement and harmony.

What is ironic is the title of the second news article: "Russian patriarch brands homosexuals as ill"

By doing so, the Patriarch has said in essence that homosexuals are like the rest of us. We are all ill, we're just disagreeing about the symptoms.