Good Enough for Some

Someone must have acquainted the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak with the antics of his merrier servants, as he has used an interview with a German journalist to issue a dispensation on condom use by male prostitutes. Using contraception to reduce the risk of HIV infection can, it now appears, be "a first step in the direction of moralisation, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants", rather as if a burglar were to steal one's property while refraining from defecating on the carpet.

As might be expected, Catholic journalists have leapt to provide the literal-minded with an appropriate exegesis. The senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter has proclaimed that the Vatican's opposition to condoms was "a PR problem" and that the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak underwent a conversion on the question of male prostitutes as early as 2006. "This is a not a church that condemns people to Aids and ... this is not a church that wilfully ignores the consequences of having unprotected sex," gushed Christina Odone, who apparently thinks global overpopulation is the fault of over-zealous storks.

In fact, the Pope merely stated that contraception can be "a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality"; in other words that it is occasionally a fitting practice for sub-humans who would like to improve themselves, and that there are other practices, like consensual homosexuality or ordaining women, which are even less excusable. Since he proclaimed last year that the distribution of condoms could make the HIV epidemic worse, it seems quite possible that the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has decided that contraception is a potential final solution to the problem of male prostitution, much as HIV was once thought to be God's answer to gays.