According to official sources cited in the Mexican press, 173 women were murdered and another 1,000 were raped in Mexico state in 2008. Less than half the murder cases were reported solved.

In its recent world report, Human Rights Watch charged that violence against women in Mexico was endemic and draped in a mantle of impunity. Indeed, the saga of the Ciudad Juarez disappearances and femicides now covers the terms of four Mexican presidents and an equal number of U.S. leaders.

What does the Ever Concerned About the Sanctity of Life as Long As It Is Unborn or Male Church have to say? It is the victims fault for wearing revealing clothing! I sh*t you NOT.

Clothing Provokes Violence, Clergy Tells Women

Saturday, January 17, 2009

by Natalia Gomez Quintero and Noemi Gutierrez
El Universal
translated by Kristin Bricker

Ecclesiastical authorities blamed women for the sexual aggressions they suffer due to the “provocative” clothing they wear.
With plunging necklines and mini-skirts, “they're provoking men,” said the archbishop of Santo Domingo, Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodrigez during the Sixth World Meeting of the Families.
Women expose themselves to rape, to being used, to being treated like an old dishrag, because they devalue themselves and their dignity, said the auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, Darwin Rudy Andino.

Similar incidents of “femicide” are reported in nearly every Latin American country, this one from just today…

From the Latin American Herald Tribune 01/25/2009

Guatemala Guerilla Army of the Poor's Norma Cruz: Every Day We're Fighting to Save Lives
By Alida Juliani
MADRID — Norma Cruz, the president of the Fundacion Sobrevivientes (Survivors Foundation), which since 2003 has been working to wipe out violence against women in Guatemala, said that every day they have to “fight to save lives” in a country where impunity and murders of women are frequent occurrences.

She is one of the people featured in the documentary “Un cambio en la mirada” produced by the FILIAPP foundation, a public policy organization, in collaboration with the EUROsocial program and Agencia EFE, Spain's international news agency.

The work is being presented Monday at the Casa de America in Madrid. Cruz discussed in an interview with Efe the details of the daily struggle and denounced the situation of impunity that prevails in Guatemala, a country in which more than 1,200 women and girls have been murdered in the last two years. “Just in 2008, there were 722 women murdered, an average of more than 50 per month,” she said.

The reason women are being murdered with impunity in Latin America has to do with the way they have been raised to view women in their Catholic dominated culture.  Until these beliefs begin to change, women will continue to be raped and murdered in these countries with few of the cases even investigated or solved.

Catholisim has a problem with women and sex in general. Its assumptions about gender and sexuality are rooted in its early history. The founding “father” of Catholism, St. Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries established certain assumptions that still plague this religion. Although Augustine acknowledged that women possessed the image of God and were redeemable, he believed that as females they were created by God from the beginning to be under male subjugation.

Women’s disproportionate guilt for the fall of humanity into sin, rooted in women’s disobedience to their subordination, meant that women could only be redeemed by accepting a redoubled subjugation to the male, even coercively so.

For Augustine the female could never represent God. Maleness was the appropriate image of rationality and spirituality, while the feminine represented the body and the material world. 

Augustine’s view of woman was complicated by his view of sex and reproduction. In the original state of innocence humans would have procreated without concupiscence or sexual pleasure. I somehow doubt that honestly.

He believed the fall into sin distorted human sexuality, making every sexual act objectively sinful, although this was forgiven or allowed within marriage for the sake of producing children. But sex even within marriage, if the reproductive effects of the sexual act were impeded, was sinful or “mere fornication.” This view made any form of birth control sinful and is the basis of Catholic teaching on birth control still today.

And as if the batsh*tery isn't deep enough…

Contraceptive pill is polluting environment: Vatican newspaper

January 3, 2009

VATICAN CITY (AFP) – The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper said Saturday.

The pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tons of hormones into nature” through female urine”, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report.

We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” he said, without elaborating further.

Personally, I think their infertility is caused by evolution at it's very best.