Domenico Bettinelli vs Lance Brisbois

The Accuser always stands up for truth. And nothing is more delicious than to see another great example of religion showing its ugly, truthful face.

The editor of Deus Caritas Est (full disclosure: he is a close friend of mine), happened upon an interesting, homophobic post on Domenico Bettinelli's blog, bettnet.com. Bettinelli quotes saint Peter Damian, an 11th century monk upset that his fellow clergy-men couldn't keep their penises in their pants.

Brisbois, editor of Deus Caritas Est, wrote a small entry on his blog, criticizing Bettinelli for being obsessed with homosexuals, whom he claims make up only 3% of the population. Brisbois is certainly correct, why should Bettinelli worry himself about such a small group of people.

The answer, of course, is because god, and his clergy, tell him to, through the bible, and their weekly (or even more frequent) conditioning events.

Regardless, Brisbois posted a deep-link to a photo of Bettinelli and his wife, to put a name with a face. He then posted a link to his criticism on Bettinelli's site as a comment. Which was responded to within ten minutes with an accusation from Bettinelli that Brisbois was a guilty of stealing his photo, and replaced the image on HIS server with an accusation saying:

The owner of this blog is a thief and an unscrupulous jerk who steals other people's work.

After this, the nastiness began. Brisbois' entry about Bettinelli's original post contained no ad-hominem attacks. It was merely a reasonable and appropriate analysis of Bettinelli's thinking. Bettinelli, however, deemed it necessary to cast aspersions on Brisbois, calling him a "typical homosexual stereotype: bitchy and mean."

I've known Brisbois for many years. Bitchy, occasionally. Mean, hardly. A stereotype, never.

He then accused Brisbois of attacking HIM, using the photo of his wife. This is paranoia at its height.

Brisbois then uploaded the saved thumbnail of the image of Bettinelli and his wife to his site, and then a few minutes later, replaced it himself with a rather humorous image that may very well describe precisely what is in Bettinelli's head most of the time.

Besides the pompousness and nasty tone in Bettinelli's response, this illustrates a deeper point: the fundamental and orthodox views of religion are always the accurate ones. This is what religion is: nasty, divisive, cruel and uncompassionate. They serve no other purpose but to strengthen one group against another. If I believed in such a place, I would say to hell with Domenico Bettinelli. Lucky for him, I don't.