So lunatic bigot Kim Davis, she of the weekend jailing and teary and breathless public breakdown (oh, the little sacrifices we must make to preserve narrow minded discrimination in the age of who-gives-a-shit enlightenment), had an audience with the Pope.
In case you forgot, Kim Davis is not Catholic. She’s Protestant. An Apostlic Pentacostal Christian to be exact. If you’re curious, it’s a view of Christianity that places one’s personal experience with God at the forefront, and believes that people of deep faith receive miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit and occasionally display their faith with fun stuff like speaking in tongues.
In other words, theologically speaking, it’s about as different as you can get from Roman Catholicism while still being Christian. You know, the kind of divide that precipitated brutal religious wars no that long ago.
Catholicism, after all, is pretty strict in maintaining that salvation cannot be had solely through a personal relationship with God. Rather, you need an interlocutor sanctioned by the Church. That is, a priest who can take your confessions and grant you various blessings.
Man in the collar’s got a hot line to Jesus that you can’t access without his help.
In a strict Catholic interpretation, Kim Davis is likely going to Hell. In a loosey goosey Apostlic Pentacostal interpretation, Old Papa Francis just might be the goddamned anti-Christ.
Of course the Devil is, as they say, in the details.
But why then? Why did the leader of the Catholic Church meet with this Holy Roller?
Maybe it was for mutual moral support. Maybe, now that LGBT people are finally gaining some semblance of legal equality in the Western world, they’re both just feeling a little blue. Maybe they came together the same way two racists nod to each other at a cocktail party. Maybe, while rounding out his P.R. tour of the U.S., the pontiff just wanted to find a nice quiet room and a sympathetic ear so he could heave a heavy sigh and let someone know that no goddamn faggots are gonna be married on His watch, by golly.
Actually, you know what? Who gives a shit? Who cares what they actually said or didn’t say, or promised to do for each other. Who care about the awkward niceties or what might’ve been lost in translation. The bottom line is this.
Most of us already realized that Kim Davis is a confused and damaged person being manipulated by more hateful elements of the religious right, who blow her like a wild-eyed trumpet. And now that Pope Francis has chosen to show his true colors in a secret meeting with Davis, which his office at first refused to comment on and then subsequently refused to deny, because who doesn’t love when a supreme religious leader communicates like a politicians caught with his fly open, can we finally stop pretending that this guy is some beacon of Liberal enlightenment simply because he isn’t a climate change science denier and isn’t looking to automatically banish divorcees to Hell?
Can we finally admit that even though he’s to the left of the Tea Party, this pope is still several notches to the right of center-right paragons like Hillary Clinton? That this guy is
only super liberal by the standard of, you know, POPES!
Francis is not a revolutionary. He has spent his career serving one of world’s largest, most influential, and most conservative institutions. And now that he sits atop it, he has proposed a few kind-hearted modifications. Nothing more. Certainly nothing revolutionary.
Mao Zedong once said revolution is not a dinner party. I’m no Maoist, but God help us revolution’s nothing more than tea and crumpets in the name of bigotry.