The Catholic Church holds up progress by denouncing Notre Dame University for inviting Obama to speak.

I really believe that if it hadn’t been for the Catholic Church and its relentless fight against progress, science, innovation, initiative, critical thinking for millennia, we would have had the Internet and man would have landed on the moon by the year 1200.

Today the bishops denounce Obama for opening up the opportunity for more stem cell research. Stem cell research is central to the advance of modern medicine, and critical for the development of cures for a number of ailments, as well as the natural growth of new organs and limbs for “spare parts” in an effort to expand our quality of life as well as our longevity. Is that a bad thing?

In the middle ages, midwives were accused of heresy and witchcraft for having knowledge of medicine and childbirth, and were frequently burned at the stake, after horrific tortures, just for helping other women give birth.  After all, they undermined the authority and power of the priests and monks, among whose ranks where the physicians, who in their own intellectual arrogance held a monopoly on the practice of medicine.

Today they can’t burn women at the stake. But they can do their best to keep trying to limit women’s rights to make their own choices about their own bodies, and all of our rights to make decisions about how to live our lives and what to study and research.

The church is threatened, so it blocks research, trying to keep us uneducated and misguided by medieval mythology and outdated moral and ethical principles.

Remember this is also the same church that almost went bankrupt defending against legal cases against dozens of clerics for sexual abuse of children.

Will the church please stay out of the way of science and government?