Hitchens and Dawkins aren't really arresting the Pope.

But this is what the The Sunday Times had as its headline:

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI

Which naturally grabs the attention and makes one read on:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

If your mind worked anything like mine, you'd envision a kind of "odd couple" buddy cop film: One is a mild-mannered Oxford professor, the other, a rough and tumble journalist, and together they are "Atheist Cops!"

PZ Myers (drat him and his being logical....) directed the attention of all who hadn't already checked out RichardDawkins.net, where Dawkins clears up what he actually means to do in the comments of a thread about the article. And supporting a legal challenge to a religious figure who has engaged in the cover-up of fairly ghastly abuse seems quite reasonable to me.

I still say that would be a hell of a buddy/cop pairing, though....