What on earth is this website doing? U.S. soldiers can post pics of the corpses of Iraqis killed in war on a website devoted mainly to amateur porn. I clicked through and saw just a couple of pics which are beyond appalling and distressing. The section for corpses – and it’s not clear whether they are of insurgents or just civilians – has this introduction:
Pictures in this forum are submitted by U.S. Soldiers from over in Iraq and Afghanistan and will probably be a little gory. So if you get sick easy or have a problem with dead terrorists please don’t look here.
If you send in pics of dead insurgents or Iraqis, you get free access to the porn part of the site. The pics that are appended have names such as “What every Iraqi should look like,” “DIE, HAJI, DIE,” and “Cooked Iraqi.” I would think this violates the Geneva Conventions, not that the U.S. under this president cares about those very much any more. But it’s also beyond depraved. Eric Muller sounded the alarm. Like the pictures from Abu Ghraib, these images are also a propaganda coup for Zarqawi and his monsters – a consequence of war in the Internet age. Have we really sunk to this?
GRACE AND GAYS: An email that speaks to the spiritual distress many of us are in right now:
I’ve been especially torn the last year with what has transpired in the church with regard to gays. I attend mass but can’t bring myself to go to communion. I’m in a small diocese (Helena, Montana) and know the bishop, who was taught by my father, and recently suggested to him that the not so sotto voce message I and many gays are getting is that of all God’s people, gays are one group the Catholic church no longer pretends to want in the fold. His silent stare confirmed that conclusion. While my personal family has always accepted me, I’m still stunned at the feeling of devastation I have experienced as a once beautiful and open church has so dramatically turned, and turned with such force against gays, both in the laity and the clergy.
I studied under a great Belgian Jesuit at the Catholic University of Louvain, Piet Fransen, who took two years to expound upon Grace, “the living, loving presence of God in the world, the church, and us.” I have thought of those days, and the lessons I learned. I have told my gay friends that leaving the Church is for me impossible, for it would be to abandon grace which I have found in every turn of my life, in family, friends, lovers; in the communities I have known, including parishes and dioceses. It was not merely a “church” we are asked to leave, but the belief that we and our lives are part of that loving presence. I’ve come to realize that it is the Church which now has come to declare our lives and our existence as gay Catholics to be grace-free zones. Perhaps that is why my bishop was able to stand quiet, his silence confirming that neither he nor the Church saw anything in our lives worthy of being part of his church.
To feel, as I do, unable to attend communion any more because of the new hierarchy is one thing. The loss is enormous. But to be informed that you are somehow inherently morally sick is quite another.
The Dish 