Queens and Concubines, and Virgins Without Number

That irrepressible comic talent, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, has responded magnificently to the need for a new shtick at the conclave, with the suggestion that Catholic priests should be released from the rule of celibacy. As the recent sex scandals demonstrate, many of them are finding it "difficult to cope", and it appears Cardinal O'Brien believes it better for the priests to marry than for the church to burn at the hands of the Jewish-homosexual witch-hunters in the Press. A violent (or, since he's a Christian, staunch) opponent of equal marriage and adoption rights for gay people, his eminence casually shrugs off both the argument from tradition and the argument from authority: priestly marriage has happened before and is happening now and there is no explicit Biblical prohibition against it; so, as any Nazi abortionist might put it, why not? It is not as yet clear whether Cardinal O'Brien believes priestly marriage would carry the same apocalyptic risks as equal marriage - multiple partners, bestiality, even perhaps ephebophilia and paedophilia - and if not, why not. Nor is it obvious how a slippery slope towards the horror of female priests could be avoided, with the attendant hideous spectre of male and female priests marrying and having domestic arguments in which each could anathematise the other with equal authority from the Divine.