Christopher Hitchens, Maureen Dowd, Mel and Hutton and the whole damn thing ...

Already the election campaign is in full stride, and the state of the country a matter for deep concern, as voters weigh up their options, and pressing pundits contemplate all manner of crises.

Already, we understand, a popular cooking program has been pushed back until midnight, with the consent of viewers, programmers and participants, so that due consideration can be given to the weighty matters under debate by our fearless leaders. The election hothouse environment we find ourselves in, it seems, is even more hot and humid than a rapidly disappearing Amazon jungle, where the intrepid Colonel Fawcett is no match for an Australian politician in search of a vote, and Australian voters are agog and entranced by the fierce debate.

What's that? Why is the pond always the last to hear? The cooking show stays and the pollies shift?

Well it's a relief, in a way, that the political debate between our fearless leaders has been moved to a timeslot where nobody need watch, and everybody can focus on what matters in a major cooking program. Why soon we'll be as up to date and current as SBS running episodes from 1998 of a Japanese cooking show in what they amusingly dub prime time ... prime time for Christopher Pearson, mebbe ...

Happily, as a result, instead of wondering if there are Shades of Latham in Abbott's IR stunt, we can scribble about the latest hijinks involving the Catholic church.

The tykes are having a hard time of late, and it never seems to stop. Oops, sorry, I was called a tyke for much of my early life, notwithstanding that it's offensive Australian slang for Roman Catholic, perhaps derived in a remote way from Yorkshire tyke, which refers offensively in a British way to a person from Yorkshire, given to the Tyke dialect, and derived from the Old Norse, tik, which is to say bitch. Now at last, thanks to the intertubes, it all becomes clear ... it's a bitch to be Catholic ...

Sorry, that was a detour, because of course the point is that the church is in hot water with lots of people for deeming that ordaining women is a grave offence, a "graviora delicta", a kind of theological error equivalent to pedophilia.

Phew, did that send the pundits off. There's Maureen Dowd, in a rage in Rome Fiddles, We Burn, reprinted by the Fairfax team locally. Gee thanks guys, but you know these days we can go to the sauce, for a fair shake of the commentariat source bottle.

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, the chairman of the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, asserted, “The Catholic Church, through its long and constant teaching, holds that ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which cannot be changed despite changing times.”

But if it was reserved to celibate men centuries ago simply as a way for the church to keep land, why can’t it be changed? If a society makes strides in not subordinating women, why can’t the church reflect that? If men prove that all-male hierarchies can get shamefully warped, why can’t they embrace the normality of equality? The Vatican’s insistence on male prerogative is misogynistic poppycock — enhancing American Catholics’ disenchantment with Rome.

Poppycock! What a fine portmanteau word it is, mixing cock with a kind of champagne cork poppy explosiveness. Its very own wiki, here, tells us that it's the anglicized form of the Dutch pappekak, which literally means soft dung or diarrhea, but metaphorically means nonsense or balderdash. It's also a brand of candied popcorn in the United States. Ah, those whacky zany Dutch and American folk ...

Meanwhile, Dowd is mad as hell and not going to take it any more, and popping corks as the Vatican issues its new rules on dealing with clergy sex abuse ...

The casuistic document did not issue a zero-tolerance policy to defrock priests after they are found guilty of pedophilia; it did not order bishops to report every instance of abuse to the police; it did not set up sanctions on bishops who sweep abuse under the rectory rug; it did not eliminate the statute of limitations for abused children; it did not tell bishops to stop lobbying legislatures to prevent child-abuse laws from being toughened.

There is no moral awakening here. The cruelty and indecency of child abuse once more inspires tactical contrition. All the penitence of the church is grudging and reactive. Church leaders are merely as penitent as they need to be to protect the institution.

And so on and so forth, as Dowd foams at the mouth about the moral equivalence of putting the concept of women priests up there with pedophilia, heresy, apostasy and schism.

Great fun, and then there's Christopher Hitchens, in a slightly delayed reaction, deciding to do over Mel Gibson, and his latest outburst, in Mel Gibson Isn't Just an Angry Narcissist His tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of right-wing Catholic ideology.

I left in the sub-header, because there's really not much point reading the details when a sub can distil the essence in such a superfine way.

Hitchens spends a good deal of his time dishing it out to Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson:

This schismatic crackpot sect is headed by Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, a nutty autodidact with a sideline in Holocaust denial. During the controversy over The Passion of the Christ, Gibson junior said that he had never heard anything but the truth from his father. I have some of old man Gibson's books on my shelf, including his self-published classics Is the Pope Catholic? and The Enemy Is Still Here!, which essentially accuse the current papacy of doing the work of the Antichrist. My favorite sample of his prose style is the following: "Our 'civilization' tolerates open sodomy and condones murder of the unborn, but shrinks in horror from burning incorrigible heretics—essentially a charitable act." He attacks the late Pope John Paul II for having said, in one of his "outreaches" to the Jewish people, "You are our predilect brothers and, in a certain way, one could say our oldest brothers." Hutton Gibson's comment? "Abel had an older brother." I don't think that there's much ambiguity there, do you? Like many ultra-conservative Catholics, the Gibsons, père et fils, have never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews in 1964.

Before proceeding to dish it out to Gibson:

It would be highly surprising if a person marinated in the doctrines of this ideology did not display all sorts of symptoms that were also sexually distraught. Racism very often clusters with sexual revulsion, and Gibson's rants are horribly larded with this element. His obsessive loathing of homosexuality—so seldom a healthy sign—is also well-known. Less well-remembered, perhaps, is the interview in which he announced that his wife of many years and the mother of his children would not, alas, be able to join him in paradise. It was not a matter of her moral character. It was simply that she had not seen fit to join the one true church. Her condemnation, then, was "a pronouncement from the chair."

Gibson has now traded in this long-suffering lady—hopelessly rupturing his sacred marriage vows—for another, younger one, who, to phrase it delicately, was almost certainly not picked for her salient Catholic virtues.

Wow, now that, as we'd say in the original old Norse sense, is fair dinkum tykishness, if we can invent a new word for bitchiness.

Sadly Hitchens, as well as showing some signs of sensitivity about the infidel Scots, doesn't play entirely fair by providing a link to Amazon, for Is The Pope Catholic?, with two new copies being peddled for $76.55 smackeroos.

Heavenly saints, and fathers ... that's a meal or two in one of the local student dives ... and such a waste of cash.

You see, Hutton Gibson has his own website, and so scribblers no longer have to blather on about how they have a copy of his self-published works, and linking to ways punters can splash the cash to savour the experience.

Thanks to the wonders of the full to overflowing intertubes, you can download such seminal works as Is The Pope Catholic? and The Enemy is Still Here! for free, in pdf form. And there are bonus publications, by other authors, such as Patrick Henry Omlor's The Robber Church, also for free, in pdf form, along with sundry other compelling works, and so come to grips with the full Christmas cake of rich fruit and nuttiness.

Yep, if you go here, to HuttonGibson.com, you can listen to audio recordings, watch videos, download the books, and sign up for a newsletter, and spend hours reading about the Catholic church and its perfidious ways.

And if that's not enough for you, and you're fully wired, in the sense of yesterday, before Chairman Rupert took over the place, you can head off to Hutton Gibson's MySpace page, or enjoy a summary of his believes and actdivities in Gibson's very own wiki, here.

Yes, there's the rich crazed nuttiness of the mainstream branch, as celebrated by Dowd, and then there's the exemplary weirdness of the splitters and schimsatics convinced that they keep alive the true flame of Catholicism. And you wonder why Mel Gibson shows an inclination to maddened outbursts ...

It's a bit like all those actors caught up in the snares and wiles of Scientology ...

By golly, suddenly the Australian election looks like a quiet pond full of sensible comment and insight, and free of sectarian feuds.

Oh no, come on down Labor candidate Adrian Schonfelder:

Mr Schonfelder, a hopeful in the safe Liberal-held Victorian seat of Flinders, had accused Mr Abbott of promoting "wedge issues".

Mr Abbott's "very strong religious views" on abortion and sex before marriage were "influencing people to take their own lives", he told the Western Port News.

Naturally the goose had to withrdaw, but not before Greg Hunt had made a meal of him.

Abbott's views? Influencing people to leave the church perhaps, or vote for the atheist party, or eat Xmas cakes rich in fruit and nuttiness, but kill themselves?

How did Neitzsche put it ? If the Catholic church doesn't manage to kill me, it can only make me stronger?

Sorry, we don't know how Tony Abbott's Catholicism crept on to the site.

Here at the pond, we're trying to run an election free zone. Quick bring me a piece of paper, so we can scribble and sign, right here and now, this momentous declaration: Election commentary on this site is dead, buried, cremated.

Now moving forward ...

Oh dear long absent lord, must we move forward ...

(Below: meanwhile, showing the world and the pond is highly current and alive to all things Catholic, excited brooding about Lindsay Lohan's new outing threatens Tony Abbott's entire campaign. Catch up with the excitement at Lindsay Lohan Back in the Habit for 'Machete', Full Frontal for 'Inferno'? And Lindsay Lohan Licks Gun, Dresses as Nun for 'Machete'. Ah popular culture, you've done it again).