A Fulda drugstore is not allowed to sell condoms - Germany

A Schlecker drugstore in Fulda is no longer allowed to sell condoms. The building that the store is located in belongs to the St. Blasius parish of the Catholic Church. The rental agreement contains a decency clause [Sittenklausel] which means that the sale of anything that would diminish the image of the Catholic Church in public is prohibited. Condoms and other chemical and mechanic contraceptives are not in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church, and the prohibition of condom sales in this building is only a logical consequence according to Christof Ohnesorge, the speaker of the diocese in Fulda.
This is now being debated in the state parliament fraction [Landtagsfraktion] of the Green Party, and delegate Margaretha Hölldobler-Heumüller noted in a letter to the parish that it is untenable to have a moral debate about the sale of condoms but to keep silent about the conditions under which Schlecker staff have to work in Germany.

Source: In diesem ehrenwerten Haus (SZ article in German, 22/03/2008).

Yoohoo! Come on people, give me an A! Give me an I! ...

this is abso-fucking-lutely ridicolous!!!

guess the church wants everyone to die of HIV

idiots!

It is not what they want.

Abstinence Obstinance is the answer!

To be fair it's not what they want but it shows the gross ignorance of the catholic church and their inability to understand that the urge to shag is greater than any guilt trip they can put on. Biology will out.

It's hardly that bad, just buy them at a different store.

Yes, of course you can just go to a different store, but it does show that the Catholic Church (and anyone else promoting abstinence over using contraceptives) lives in another world (the one where people actually do not have sex when they are told not to). I don't know what it'll take to make them realize that.

Education , education , education. Oh, hang on a minute. They like to do the education.

It will take massive falling levels of attendance and a brave forward looking Pope.

St. Blasius?? LOL

I think they realize.

For yer information, Dr. Dimwit, you can get HIV from that too.

Thats not all the Catholic church wants to ban...
See 'New SIns'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7287071.stm

including:-
Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

Thankfully they are open to interpretation...perhaps this could be one?
Environmental pollution (Driving a car)
Genetic manipulation (Choosing an attractive intellegent spouse)
Accumulating excessive wealth (Having a job)
Inflicting poverty (Not donating money to the Catholic church)
Drug trafficking and consumption (Realtively precise)
Morally debatable experiments (Quite vague)
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature (I agree with this one!)

I love the morally debatable it doesn't even have to be morally wrong, someone simply has to question it's morality and it is a sin! *evil laugh* can I make up some new sins too!

Does that mean the Catholic church will come out fully against biotechnology and all of medicine and pharmaceutical products then?

Hopefully, then the resulting plague will wipe out most of them and the rest of us can live in peace.

lol Ok Iain, lets here some new sins!!

A few ideas

I'm curious whether the new sins were passed down from God in some sort of Biblical event or just decided by the current religious hierarchy.

well first one would be for a girlfriend not to recognize steak and blowjob day as an official holiday.

second one would be about Jehovah witness' turning religion into door to door salesmanship, that I think would be a deadly sin

Again, that is not what they say.

The church has so many weak points that people can attack if so desired, that I do not understand this need of twisting or exaggerating anything they say. This is plain ridiculous.

Let's all consider ourselves lucky we don't live in Manila in the philipines, where contraception is often, in effect banned by the Catholic Church, in spite of the fact the Philippines are suffering heavily from massive overpopulation and poverty.

Contraceptives were banned in Ireland until the mid 80s. Scary when I think about it.

eof, that is tame. Imagine getting an ectopic pregnancy and instead of undergoing a simple medical procedure to end the pregnancy, you have to wait until your fallopian tubes burst, killing the fetus, before they can operate. (since the doctors aren't allowed to kill a fetus, even though its inevitable)

If you do the obvious thing, you go to jail.

How very Christian of you. Bonus marks for timing.

Really? The Catholic church in the UK at present is pushing for the defeat of the governments current genetic legislation and has lobbied all Catholic MPs to oppose it with a campaign of VERY blatant deceptive manipulation of the facts.

The issue? Research using fused human genetic material with animal eggs to create viable stem cell lines.

The UK is the world leader in stem cell research and this legislation is needed urgently to clear a logjam due to a shortage of donated human eggs.

If the bill is defeated, as the Catholic church presumably hopes, it will slow down or more probably prevent research into treatments for diseases as diverse as Parkinsonism, Diabetes and MS.

And yet the Catholic opposition rests on a complete failure to even understand the basics of this research. It makes them look like scientific Luddites.

So important is this issue to medical research that ALL the leading medical research charities in the UK have signed an open letter sent to all MPs calling on them to ignore the church on this crucial issue:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7310918.stm

You are only confirming what I've said.
Absolutely no need to invent or exaggerate

huh?

you took the words right out of my mouth Carm

How on earth have I confirmed anything you wrote Sinderbox?

I gave you an example of where the Catholic church is opposing a pretty crucial piece of legislation to the horror of every medical charity and just about anyone who knows any of the basics of the science concerned.

You have confirmed that there is absolutely no need to invent or exaggerate, as you did at the beginning.

The church has so many weak points that you can attack it, if so desired, without twisting or exaggerating, as you did later.

shaking head

wondering where Bell twisted or exaggerated in his post? He certainly didn't.

He did.
(and was not even the first one on this thread)

FFS, it was a wry comment based on the fact that the Catholic church is indeed mounting an attack on biotechnology at the moment in the UK. Further, if the BBC article is correct and the Catholic church has indeed added "genetic manipulation" and " Morally debatable experiments" to its list of "sins" and will oppose all of these with the vigour they oppose contraception and abortion then following through their logic they will have to oppose ALL pharmaceuticals and ABSOLUTELY ALL biotechnology-derived products including medicines, cleaning products and non-organically grown foods.

Why? All pharmaceutical products must be tested on animals before they can be tested on man - something that many people including a good few Catholic theologians regard as morally unacceptable. Further, the manufacturing process for biotechnological products includes the genetic manipulation of bacteria, plants, hens, llamas, sheep etc etc to act as biological mini-manufacturing plants for the enzyme, antibody, vaccine, oligonucleotide etc etc.

I rather doubt from the comments recently attributed to the Catholic primi of Scotland and England that the Catholic hierarchy even has a basic understanding of the technologies they are now foaming at the mouth about. One would hope that if they do become aware, they will hastily revise church teaching as being completely at odds with the modern world. Indeed if they do not, and do persist in this line, they will indeed have to follow through and reject modern medicine.

Further objections from leading UK scientists to the campaign of wronheaded misinformation being cynically mounted by the Catholic Church in the UK

However they will not and are not coming out fully against all of medicine. And they do not want everyone to die of HIV. This are cheap rhetorical comments that are not needed, specially given the amount of facts that one can be choosing from, as you later did.

I agree with Sinderbox!

"However they will not and are not coming out fully against all of medicine." (Certainly not the ones the bigoted cult leader is using, god forbid.)

"And they do not want everyone to die of HIV." (Except for the homos maybe? Oh wait, you mean the all-mighty pope decrees that god doesn't hate fags? Only that they shouldn't be treated like other normal human beings? SORRY!)

I think what Cyn might be saying (and let me apologize here and now if I misinterpreted her) is that when it comes to an unctuous, scatological corporation that has murdered, tortured and violated millions of lives and continues to scrub history, spread ignorance and spout lies, many of us really don't give a rat's ass what it wants, or what it really wants, or what it really really REALLY wants.

How's that for exaggeration?

Cyn wrote with founded indignation, you wrote with plain naked hate.

No you will find that the only person wanting anyone on this thread to die is BTC himself. Which says quite a lot about him.


Also I dug this up , which rather is the icing on the cake:

Al Qaeda to target the Vatican next?

Well, that's a bit extreme - and I'd call myself a Catholic. OK, my snappy remark at school to "what's your beatitude?" was always "sassy and stylish":-) but I tried my best...

Luckily I went to quite a progressive RC School, so our school mantra was always "The RC church advises (not forces) it's congregation to do this or that..."

Still, even so: I remember quite a lively discussion about using condoms: It went something like: since murder is a sin in RC eyes, technically it could be argued that 2 monogamous partners in wedlock, one of whom is HIV positive via a blood transfusion could be technically (under the eyes of a church) commiting murder by having unprotected sex with the other (e.g. no condom). So the RC church condones murder, does it???

That got our teacher caught up in knots trying to explain her way out of it. I think eventually she proclaimed abstinence was the responsible thing to do in that situation, which still kind of conflicted with the whole "ultimate expression of love in a wedded relationship" thing...

Ahh - school days...The best bit was getting our class "growing up / sex talk" by a RC priest (because they are sooo experienced, of course) That was a hoot!

I might be wrong but isn't the "ultimate expression of love in a wedded relationship" just secondary side effect? I thought sex, for the church, was above anything else procreation.

After all Onan was not punished by god for performing the act we call nowadays after his name, but rather for wasting his seeds.

Advising people what to do doesn't really work with religion though. God's word is absolute and if you don't follow it, you're going to hell. That's what the church wants you to believe - there's no advising there. It's just another of those contradictions you have to expect from religious folk.

I must say I find the ruling described in the title of this post rather extreme. Yet, after 7 years of living in Germany I experienced a somewhat worrying amount of extremism. And I can safely say, the worst perpetrators were those I encountered whilst working for the Diocese of Regensburg as a teacher in a Convent school. (Where the dear old pope himself hails from).

Church source please?

I cant see what the fuss is - regarding a landlord (i.e. the catholic church) specifiying conditions to its tenant (i.e. the drugstore) on some things that it does not want sold on its premises.

Would there be such a fuss if an ardent private tee-total landlord told a supermarket (or Drugstore) tenant not to sell alcohol as part of the conditions of rental?

The tenant can simply tell the landlord to hump his restrictive offer and go somewhere else.
What is the big deal. Really?

(or is it just a good chance for Toytown to get all worked up and angry against the Catholic church for the umpteenth time??)

EDIT: I would say that schlecker should be angry if these restrictive terms were not pointed out in advance! And legally probably cannot be stopped doing it either.

No need to give a source. That's how religion works.

If I'm wrong here, then what's god's penalty for going against something advised by the church? And how do you differentiate between what's optional and what's compulsory? I've never heard of optional dogma...

This is exactly where most athiests get it wrong. Yes, there are fundamentalists out there who believe the word of god is absolute but that's not how most people practice. Any religion is what you make of it and you can take whatever bits you want and leave the rest. Some of the higher-ups might disagree but in the end it doesn't matter, it's only yourself you have to answer to.

My mother considers herself a catholic, believes in evolution, thinks the bible is a myth and yet still believes in and has faith in the roman catholic god. Sure there might be some priests that would consider what she's doing as wrong but there are also many who agree with her and either way, what does she care, she's not catholic to please them. I think this more or less describes most non-fundamentalist religious people today.

If she beleives in the Roman Catholic god she has to beleive that the popes law on earth is pretty much the word of god or shes not really catholic.. Thats why I'm an ex-catholic. Alot of these people that make the rules themselves just call themselves generic Christians. Catholics have to agree with catholic dogma or calling themselves catholic has no meaning..

I mean I have no problem with people choosing bits and peices of a religion to make them happy, especially as said people are usually the reasonable sky wizard worshippers, but if you believe in a perfect God then you are kind of painted in a corner on some issues, regardless of how much you may disagree with them.

No she doesn't, she can believe whatever she wants, try stopping her. I have also had this exact conversation with an RC priest who basically said the same thing, all he wants from his parishioners is faith in God, the rest he said is a guideline at most.

Sure, she can believe whatever she wants, but if she believes in evolution and thinks the bible's a myth then she's not actually a catholic - she's just gone and invented her own religion that's loosely based on catholicism.

I thought God was Jewish

Says you. Doesn't make it so, no two people will ever interpret any religion the same way, even the words of the pope are open to individual interpretation. It doesn't have to be absolute, the only people who think it is (other than the fundamentalists) are the athiests who just don't get it.

I agree, she can believe whatever she wants, and call herself whatever she wants, more power to her. But being a Catholic has rules you are supposed to adhere to or your not Catholic. I mean I can consider myself Christian and then go rape, steal, and murder, but my perceptions don't matter. Part of the Catholic beleif system is that god gave peter authority to make essentially divine law on Earth and that power is then handed down to the successor popes.

And I may just be an athiest who doesnt get it, but I'm fairly well versed in Catholic mythology. Some things you can wriggle around, but Papal Decree is not one of them.