For Pope, gays are the new jews

So, the Grand Iquisitor, er, Pope, wants to ban gays from the priesthood:

The Roman Catholic Church is to ban homosexuals from becoming priests, even if they have no intention of being sexually active.

The tough new directive, to be signed by Pope Benedict XVI as an "instruction", has already been written and is expected to be published after the international synod of bishops in Rome next month.

Scotching rumours that the controversial document may have been shelved, a church official in Rome told The New York Times: "The matter is not if it will be published, but when."

The document will lend substance to Pope Benedict's stated desire to "purify" a church whose reputation has been besmirched, in the United States and elsewhere, by a devastating paedophilia crisis implicating thousands of ordained priests. A recent study found that 81 per cent of the victims of paedophile priests were adolescent boys.

I'm not a Catholic, hell I'm not even a Christian, but my question is, why would gays even want to be associated with a church that so obviously doesn't want them?

Pope Benedict put his views on record as long ago as 1986. Homosexuality, he wrote, was "a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an inherent moral evil". As Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor to the Inquisition, he banned declared gays from mass and closed down gay organisations within the Church. Since he became Pope, the Church has stepped up its declared hostility to gay marriage, and even the mooted recognition in Italy of homosexual civil partnerships.

I mean jeez, "an inherent moral evil"?!

Just to engage in some cheap pop-psychology, can I posit that some gays, no doubt sourced in their much denigrated place in society, are just a wee bit masochistic?

How else do you explain gay Catholics, or gay Republicans?