The World Youth Day Papal Circus is due in Sydney (Randwick Racecourse) for six hellish days at the end of July. So far, things have been going well for the God botherers in fancy dress, as the secular state bends like a choir boy to get that clerical shaft of approval.

First, the good people of New South Wales have forked out over $160 million of tax payers' money (up from $40 million and still rising) to defray the costs that the poor Church is facing. Then we found out that large parts of the city would be restricted, including locking people out of their own driveways, knocking down public trees, and generally inconveniencing people trying to get on with their normal, everyday lives. Now, to top it all off, we've discovered we can't take the piss out of these idiots or protest the Catholic Church's repugnant policy towards pedophiles, sex education, or contraception.

These laws exceed anything that was put in place for the Olympics or APEC. Nice to know that being a skirt-wearing God botherer allows you to stop people from exercising their rights. Anti-abuse organisations have been specifically told that they must have any banners or T-shirts they wish to wear approved by the police (and no doubt through them, and the hard-core Catholic Police Commissioner, the Church) and must not protest at any of the main WYD sites or face arrest. So, first we rape your body as children and then we rape your rights as citizens. Great to see that the Church is still practicing the see no evil, hear no evil approach that let all these consecrated child molesters get away with abusing children for so long. Now, if all these annoying little people would just go away and let us worship our invisible friend in the sky in peace; at one with our misogyny and homophobia.

Hopefully, these laws are just going to provoke people to get very pissed and make their displeasure clear.

I was going to ignore the entire process, but now my annoying shirt and I are going to get an outing because I'll be damned if my rights are going to be impinged to protect the delicate sensibilities of people who believe they eat human flesh every Sunday.

This week there were some glorious assholes. Many of them were just members on our message boards, but they are not worthy of attention. So, I give you my Asshole Fuckfaces of the week.

First, up, the entire Catholic Church.

Okay, that may be a bit broad. How about just the crazy men who run the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is against a bunch of fun stuff, like gay sex, preists having intercourse, birth control and premarital sex. And this week they came out in favor of “Chimeras.” What the fuck are chimeras? Good question. Human-animal hybrid embryos. And the Church is all for them.

Ah, ain’t that sweet? It is totally okay for a woman to raise a child that was fathered by a different species of animal, like a mouse. Did I mention that the Catholic Church is against using frozen embryos for stem cell research?

I do love interspecies lovin’. The Chinese kicked this nonsense off when they combined rabbit and human cells, which survived for a few days. The Mayo Clinic picked up the ball and last year made a piglet that had human blood. Next year Stanford hopes to make mice with human brains. Some people think there is an ethical dilemma.

Except the Catholic Church, who just want more babies to follow Jesus! Creepy fucks.

Next up, Mitt Romney, dog torturer.

This week, Romney got himself a little puff piece in the Boston Globe. It was meant to show how cool and collected he can be under pressure, but instead showed him to be a creepy weirdo. According to the article, Mitt used to strap the family dog to the top of a station wagon for family trips. Because, you know, you wouldn’t want the family dog to actually be riding with the family in the car. It would feel loved. That would be disgusting.

Wow. Way to coolly and calmly handle a “doggy so stressed out that it had diarrhea” situation. You should totally be president, Clark Griswald. That “emotion-free crisis management” kind of makes you seem like a psychopath. Oh, and you broke the law, fuckface.

Next on our list, The Democrats!

Not the entire party, just the ones in the Senate who rolled over like pussies two years ago and allowed Samuel Alito to become a Supreme Court Justice. They can cry all they want from here on out about the direction of the country but they laid down like a bunch of spineless fucks in what will go down as one of the most important times in our country. Alito is everything he was sold as and anyone with a brain knew weeks like this were coming.

This week the Crazy Conservative Court severely curbed local efforts to promote racial diversity in schools, curbed students' free speech rights, crippled Congress' ability to keep corporate money out of political advertising, made it almost impossible for women to prevail on claims of long term sex discrimination and overturned a 96 year old precedent to allow manufacturers to collude with retailers to set the minimum prices of products.

Yay, for religion and big business!

How can we have an Asshole Fuckface Roundup with George?

Our wonderful president and his legal counsel make this week’s list for desperately trying to cover up their own crimes. This week the White House claimed executive privilege and rejected subpoenas from Congress, who are seeking information about the US Attorney’s purge.

Yes, the White House made an amazingly “reasonable attempt at compromise.” Their idea of a compromise is to have Miers and Taylor come over for a closed-door chat with the Committee. Oh, and the Senators can’t write anything down.

Transcripts are so very convenient. They are meant to make sure people don’t lie and commit, what did he call it…”perjury.” I think if you are worried about a “perjury trap” then you are planning to “lie.” Fortunately for the White House, they can pull this kind of crap because nobody likes them. Nobody.

Next up on the Asshole Fuckface list: iphone and Steve Jobs.

I would really like to get an iphone, but I would rather have my arm cut off than sign a contract with AT&T. (I don’t know why those are the options either) Besides having the world’s worst customer service, AT&T has been allowing the Bush administration to illegally wiretap phones.

Yes, get your iphone and allow the NSA to illegally record all of your phone calls and keep records of all your Internet activity, emails and IM chats.

There are no options other that AT&T, the people who have been working with our own government spooks to set up massive, data-mining machines in AT&T offices all over the country. So, enjoy your iphones while your support the company undermining you freedom! But you got a fun gadget!

Catholic religious dogma has it all figured out. After you die, if you've been good, you go to heaven. If you were bad, you go to purgatory only until you've sorted things out, then you go to heaven. If you were really bad, you go to hell. Simple, efficient, easy. Right? Well, almost. The system raises some thorny theological questions. According to Catholic doctrine, baptism is the cleansing of original sin, and that, coupled with an acceptance of Jesus, is required in order to gain entry into heaven. So what about all the people who have lived perfectly good, moral lives but were never exposed to Christianity? Or unbaptized babies who die before they ever had a chance? That's where limbo comes in. Limbo has never been a formal part of Catholic religious doctrine, but has been widely referred to amongst theologians. The concept dates at least as far back as Gregory Nazianzen , who in the fourth century postulated the existence of an alternative state of the afterlife "that infants dying without Baptism will neither be admitted by the Just Judge to the glory of Heaven, nor condemned to suffer punishment, since, though unsealed by Baptism, they are not wicked…" and was later accepted by many theologians as being something of a nice place but not as good as heaven.

The current pope, Benedict XVI, described his disdain for the concept of limbo over twenty years ago in his Ratzinger Report, and his ascendancy to the papacy has given him authority to canonize his position on the matter, which has now been accomlished by his allowing the publication of "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised" which officially disavows any endorsement of the concept of limbo.

All of which is very nice for those unbaptized babies. But there may be more to this than simply a refutation of a doctrine that was never fully fleshed out. Benedict's quizzical explanation for lack of belief in the concept, that limbo was"only a theological hypothesis" and "never a defined truth of faith" seems somewhat self-contradictory, since defined truths don't really require faith in the first place. The truth is that while Catholicism is still strong in the United States and Europe, its two biggest areas of growth are in Africa as well as in Asia, particularly in developing countries. Not coincidentally, these countries also suffer extremely high rates of infant mortality when compared with countries where Catholicism has historically been strong but is no longer growing at an appreciable rate. Could Benedict's push to reconsider the concept of limbo also be a shrewd marketing ploy to recruit converts to the religion? It seems reasonable enough, as Catholicism might be a harder sell to people who believe that it represents a philosophy explicitly stating that any of their children who died are forever condemned to sit around in a place that's just OK.