Colbert on same-sex funerals

Its was a very apt analogy I think, a wonderful bit of satire in the purest "A Modest Proposal" sense. In resisting gay marriage at all costs people are refusing to look into the future (or even the present) at the ramifications for real people in loving relationships. Gay couples already have the indignity of often not being able to visit the love of their life in the hospital while ill. Now consider if you could not even handle the funeral arrangements for the person you have lived with for 17 years. When people resist these kinds of measures they seperate themselves from their humanity, from their caring for other people, by hiding behind principles with no foundation.

Well, technically I suppose if there were a grave reason to, a public vocal and openly defiant advocate of and participant in the gay subculture could theoretically be denied Christian burial for fear of scandal. HOWEVER, I would hope any cleric worth his salt would be more pastoral than that in the case of a person struggling with the disorder of homosexual or other deviant sexual impulses. We are all broken in some way. Homosexuality is not some outlandish taboo. Like all sin it is destructive and unoriginal; it is a sin just like any other grave sin, and ought to be opposed and its victims and perpetrators offered mercy and healing just as any grave sin is opposed and its victims and perpetrators are offered mercy and healing..

When I watched this the other night I thought this was a very good commentary, but then I realized that there might be people who really would want to deny gays and lesbians Catholic funerals.

Isn't it a corporal work of mercy to bury the dead?

Weren't some religious communities founded for this very purpose, particularly during the European plagues?

I know the bitter and abusive might cynically, faced with the Colbert Death Panel Plan, so cruelly say, "So, who'll bury our clergy and religious?"

But I should not ask the deceased their transgressions from my own moral code. Burying the dead is a work of mercy. What goes around comes around. Hopefully someone might be so kind one day, in light of my lack of blood family here in exile in the desert, as to do the same for me; I pray in Mexico, with hand shovels, as I have done these past years for so many truly beloved church menbers who have passed on with our prayers for their peace and our own.

Too many in fact, recently.

I ask not for whom the bell tolls, nor their alternative styles.
In this small humble community all are known, and loved.

For whom the bell tolls?
It tolls for me.