As some of you know, my youth was filled with religion and church and well into my twenties, I tried to serve an angry God.  God was angry for many reasons, but with me, mostly because I liked men.  How those years still affect me, I can never really explain in full.  To, as many before and after have, pray fervently for the removal of these desires day after day was painful.  

So I left the church.  And I became a secular agnostic.  Certainly an atheist in any way that the Pentecostals of my youth would understand.  To this day, the majority of the Christian community in this country battles against the lives of those like me, and those whom I love and cherish.  The rules are enormously complicated and petty in the extreme.

And so it is with the passing of Ted Kennedy, who the Vatican has described as a “nobody.”  All his work to feed the poor, to aid the immigrants, to stand against war, to give voice to the powerless, all this means nothing because he did not see that he should impose the religious beliefs of a church on women in this country when it came to abortion.  From Time Magazine: 

During Benedict’s 2008 trip to the U.S., there was some heated debate — with conflicting photographs and eyewitness accounts — about whether Kennedy took Holy Communion at the papal Mass at Nationals Stadium in Washington, with conservatives insisting that the Pope says the rite should be denied to prochoice politicians. With this in mind, Church observers are keen to see if Boston’s Archbishop Cardinal Sean O’Malley will preside over Kennedy’s funeral. Some conservatives already see the fact that the rites are not being held in a cathedral (but rather at the Senator’s favorite church) as significant.

For four decades Ted Kennedy remained the nation’s most prominent Roman Catholic politician, as well as brother of America’s first and only Catholic President…

“Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody. He’s a legend with his own constituency,” says the Vatican official. “If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too.” Some say the final sunset on the Kennedy name within Catholic halls of power was the Vatican’s decision in 2007 to overturn the annulment of the first marriage of former U.S. Representative Joe Kennedy, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy. The successful appeal by Joe Kennedy’s ex-wife Sheila Rauch, an Episcopalian, was another blow to the Kennedy image in Catholic circles.

Cathedrals versus churches, marriages, divorces, and annulments, blessings, communion:  all a game-like house of cards.  When my father, a lapsed Catholic, was dying, all he wanted was confession, communion, and the last rites.  He hadn’t been in church in years.  But he was very sick for a very long time.  He used to say that you can take the boy out of the Catholic Church, but you could never take the Catholic Church out of the boy.  

He was denied his last request of the Catholic Church.  He had married a protestant in a civil service.  He had three bastard children (in the eyes of the Church).  We could all convert, and he could marry them and then he would bless him.  My mother offered to convert (a bigger offer than you could ever imagine for this Scottish born Protestant).  My father said no.

In this story, President Obama delivers a note from Ted Kennedy.  Even the president is ignorant to its contents.  Probably a request for a blessing, supposes the magazine.  So what I’ll never understand is how a man of God could deny a dying man his last wish on his deathbed because of some rule.  Surely if there is a God, he would not care.  And if he did, he wouldn’t be a God worth serving.