Religion, sex and politics

Let’s talk about all those things that are dangerous to mention at a dinner party with people you’ve only recently met:

* Here’s a bit of trivia, but I have been meaning to say this for some time: this painting of John Henry Newman always reminds me of a young Jonathan Miller. Am I right, or am I right?

* I recently found an article on why Catholics don't go to confession anymore which I thought was pretty good. (It noted the recent change in the concept of sin from the strictly personal to more "corporate" or social sense as being in large par responsible.) But now I can't find it again. In any event, I was going to add that I think the power relationship between priest and penitent is also now an issue, with people no longer confident of the confession of sins as an anonymous exercise which does not change the relationship between them and their parish priest. (And, sure, you could travel out of your parish to get true anonymity, but that is a bit troublesome.)

So, I thought, couldn't the internet help out? Confessions by Skype to an anonymous priest who could be anywhere in the world? But it seems Rome has already dismissed this as a possibility back in 2001. Yet, would it be better to have some form of one-on-one confession than none at all? I think the fact that sins are stated out loud is important, rather than merely thought about during, say, the penitential part of the Mass. (Just in the way that the spoken declaration of love carries more power to the person saying it than the mere thought of it.)

Hence my wish list for reform of the Catholic Church grows: relax celibacy rules for priests; and get with the internet for a real revival of confession.

* A few weeks ago, there was a news story about the rate of HIV amongst American gay men which I forgot to mention:

One in five sexually active homosexual men in the US has HIV, and almost half of those who carry the virus do not know they are infected, a study has found.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tested more than 8000 men in 21 cities in 2008, and found that even as infection rates were climbing among men who have sex with men, young, sexually active gay men and those in minority groups were least likely to know their health status, while the rates of other at-risk groups - heterosexuals and intravenous drug users - were falling.

Aren’t they just extraordinarily high figures after all these years of attempted education and behaviour modification?

* In other news I overlooked noting earlier, everyone was also surprised last month that a big survey indicated that Britain was not as gay as it seems. (1% identifying as gay, .5% as bisexual.) People say that, as it was based on doorstep and telephone questioning, there may well be some under-acknowledgement, but no one seems to expect that the “true” rate is dramatically higher.

It certainly seems that the gay lobby has a political and general agenda setting clout far beyond their numbers.

* I’ve taken to trusting Tim Colebatch’s economic/political commentary of late, and today’s column talks about the issue of cutting back government spending. He seems to believe it is more a case of tax reform needed, rather than urgent spending cuts.

* Green preferences to Labor were no higher in the recent election than at the 2007 election. In fact they were slightly less. That’s a bit surprising.

* Finally, I liked Charlie Brooker’s column on the Franzen book mix up, where some file mix up meant the wrong version of Freedom was published in some numbers. Charlie writes of his own technique:

At first glance, this looks like an almighty disaster, albeit an understandable one. Like anyone who's ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I'm writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as FINALSCRIPT2a.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1b-IGNORE-ALL-OTHERS-AND-USE-THIS.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1c- I-AM-SPARTACUS.DOC.