Pope Donald the Worst?

 

 Just when I thought I was inured to the fly-paper tackiness of TrumpWorld, they succeed in flabbering the brutal hell out of my gaster. The above AI portrait of the prick as a pontiff honestly did get posted by the White House account on the Truth Social site, and despite the usual formulation of "disappointed but not surprised", I think I'll actually chuck this one into the "surprised but not disappointed" bin.

You see, the knob-glazers surrounding the president have run off with a passion after "buy Greenland" and "make Canada the 51st state", so why not humor yet another megalomaniac delusion of the slowly rotting Turnip-in-Chief? 

I should have expected as much when Sen. Graham spoke as if Trump as Pope was a real possibility:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suggested that the more than 230 Catholic Cardinals in the conclave “keep an open mind” about considering President Donald Trump for the papacy.

“I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope,” Graham posted Tuesday on X. “This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility! The first Pope-U.S. President combination has many upsides. Watching for white smoke…. Trump MMXXVIII!”

Graham showed support for the idea after President Trump was asked by a reporter if “he had anyone in mind” to succeed Pope Francis after he died at the age of 88.

People assumed he was joking. Nay, nay. He was planting seeds. 

Not My Circus, Not My Pontifex

 

The Pope says Ukraine should have the courage to raise a white flag and negotiate an end to the war.

"The word negotiate is a courageous word. When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate.”

(First reported by… pic.twitter.com/Mpl8rQhcy9

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) March 9, 2024

As for me, I believe in the courage of telling Putin to go to Hell. To negotiate with evil is to grant it power. It does not save lives. It only tells them which lives are sacrificed today, and then there is tomorrow, and tomorrow....

The argument I have with the Pope here is the one I have with absolute pacifists anywhere: is there no noble stand, nothing you would fight for? Can you not distinguish invader from invaded? Why would you suppose that the laying down of arms against tyranny would result in an end to killing when the perpetrator--Putin's Russia, has again and again said they have no intention of stopping here? How is it on Ukraine to choose which people of theirs are fit to be martyrs for an illusory greater good?

Because the result of Putin winning isn't about territory, but the span of his influence, and the kind of government and repression he represents. It is about the lives of the people in that territory he holds and the future of their lives. The fight was started by Putin--he could have the courage of realizing that mass death for his ego is a sin. He could have the courage of backing down and reaping the whirlwind of his botched dictatorship. He could disengage now from Ukraine as Gorbachev did from Afghanistan, understanding that it would be a situation from which the bleeding would never end. 

It is the thing his great sin of imperialistic pride would not have him do--but what a conscience would dictate if he had one. 

Who thinks after any negotiation, the conflict would be over? How does Russia hold what it never should have obtained, with what violence? There is nothing in the ruined cities, the raped women, the kidnapped children, the promised enforcement of Russian culture and erasure of Ukrainian history that is not appalling. The negotiated future is just more violence, of a different and more insidious kind.

Go and chide the sinner, and don't ask the sinned against to fucking forgive in advance the horrors they would lay down their lives to save their loved ones from. 

We don't look at Pius XII in an un-admixed way. I would let the current pope consider very well the use of his pulpit. Humans are all fallible, some just need to demonstrate it less. He has a place from which to influence history. This is not that way. He would not be a peacemaker, only one who sanctions making a desert and calling it peace. 

Faith With Only Signifying Indignant BS Works is Dead

 

The LA Dodgers decided to recognize the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for Pride, and then they didn't, and then they belatedly did. The decision to support the Sisters is the right one, even if it's getting stupid flack, and here's why, from me, the erstwhile Catholic-adjacent agnostic.

The ministry of the Sisters has gone among the people and held them up and comforted them and tried to teach them to be considerate and do no harm to one another, It has used satire of organized religion, but that's because those memes are accessible and subject to very real conversations about the actual harms that bigotry in religion causes, and that the failure to be real and upfront about sexuality in education perpetuates. 

Marco Rubio can pretend that the Sisters are anti-Catholic because of their criticism of a faith that hasn't delivered for the downtrodden--he can pretend LGBT sexuality is a choice and a sin for whatever deflection from his lived reality floats his boat, but in the real world, you either serve one another or you will be marked by the master you actually serve. And Marco serves himself. For all I can tell. And the people who wanted to protest the Pride celebration the LA team held are so dumb. 

MTG and Entropy

 

The funny thing with the recent Tweet I want to highlight from perpetually aggrieved Rep. MTG is that she right off the bat starts with the most obviously offensive thing that liberals actually don't defend. She writes:

"If you are defending pedophile priests and those that protect them, groomer teachers & Disney LGBTQ propaganda, Drag Queen story time, saying it's not Satan convincing women to abort their unplanned child, and that children can be mutilated to change their gender, you're wrong."

While I'm in favor of freedom of religion, I've long deplored the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and would not ever defend it, and many people would tend to agree with that--particularly former Catholics and people who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or "none of the above" religiously. If anything, the Church's protection of perhaps 2-5% of clergy in those hopes of preserving its worldly reputation and self-defense against outside criticism has displayed the rot of an organization closed to debate. 

Where she goes from there is a peculiarly tightening circle of pronouncements of less certainty--groomer teachers? Sure, I think teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau or Pamela Joan Rogers or Debra Lefave are deeply troubling, but it seems to me that this is not exactly what Greene is referring to. She appears to be considering simply being LGBTQ-affirming with being a groomer, and with being Disney "propaganda".  

The common understandings of words like "groomer" and "propaganda" have negative connotations and she is employing those negative connotations to distort the impression of the actual things many teachers (like a teacher recently censured for putting up rainbow stickers in her classroom) might do without any malicious or nefarious intent or what Disney had done (mildly support LGBT people).

To put it bluntly, she's trying to make people agree with her wildly false interpretations of the world. And no, Marge--I know a lie when I see one. Sorry. 

She also throws in Drag Queen story time which is a thing that amuses me--wearing women's clothing isn't a problem when I (cis-gender female) do it, but suddenly becomes a problem when men do it? So weird! And yet, I imagine there's considerable overlap between the people who would consider a man wearing women's clothing wrong and who would definitely ask a woman "What were you wearing?" if she were sexually assaulted, so I guess there's that. But there's nothing really disturbing about reading by a drag performer in a well-attended public setting vs what quite normally-attired, heteronormative persons have gotten up to when quite out of sight.

Maybe her real problem is people being exposed to books in the first place. There is a GOP war against schools and libraries, after all. 

The Satan part is entirely "creation by Marge" in that she recently said women were consorting with Satan in hopes of entrapping a man with their foul ensnarements and chemical conjurings...which is some wild Malleus Maleficarum throwback which I find fairly extraordinarily on-the-nose. And last of all, her comments regarding surgery or mutilation don't display that she understands anything about the subject at all. 

But of course, people who disagree with her POV, however uninformed it might be, are the ones who are wrong. This is how a person ends up spouting weird things about Jewish space lasers--a closed system choking on its own decay. It's a fascinating thing to see so concisely within one Tweet the range from epistemic closure to entropy rapidly increasing in a thick skull.

What I Cannot Swallow

 

The US Catholic Bishops would like Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States and observant Catholic, to be barred from the sacrament of communion because he holds, as a matter of conscience, that other people should also follow the dictates of their conscience with regard to the medical termination of pregnancy.

I am unbaptized and non-believing, so I can't speak for the practice of communion as a Christian, but I studied the odd bit of theology. Sharing in the body of Christ is a reminder that God so loved us, he became flesh, and we are closer to him through that gift. In the Bible, Christ asks us to recognize that we share oneness in the body--what you do to anyone, imagine you do to Him. The leaders of the Church in America are denying a member of their body communion with that body. They are cutting him off because he cares what happens to female-bodied people trying to access reproductive health care.

I'm not a person of faith, but I've been female-bodied my whole life, and my sex is one of the reasons why I've always felt the Church had nothing for me. Where was the culture of life for the children of the Magdalene laundries, or for the women themselves? Where was the culture of life for indigenous children in the United States, Canada or Australia? Where was the culture of life when children were and are sexually assaulted by church leaders? Whre was the culture of life when women stayed married to husbands without benefit of divorce, being abused and giving birth to child after child? If they never cared to deny the sacrament to warmongerers, or torturers, or supporters of the death penalty, why pick on Grandpa Joe Biden, who just thinks maybe people can choose whether they should have kids right now, and understands that these things are complicated? Because of any number of things, tragic and not. 

I don't know how significant it is to receive communion in the form of a religious ritual, because to me, communion is when you empathize with other human beings you meet along the way--and believe me, Biden does this. He is a gregarious, people-oriented person who can't not feel for others. I think the Church is actually diminished when it stoops to this kind of low political pettiness. I would greatly prefer it leave Biden's conscience alone, and consider the Church's own.

A Matter Of Perspective

Sometimes, there are stories that you want to sit on as a blogger, even if it seems like the thing to do is "post while the iron is hot". But I didn't have any interest in hurrying where the Covington Catholic kids' videos were concerned because there were multiple sides of the story, and I wasn't counting on anyone necessarily getting the full picture because the story sometimes gets lost in the symbolism. These white kids and their MAGA hats. The elder and his dignified drumming. We can unpack these things slowly if we want to, and do the work of understanding, and watching the many different perspectives, or we can work from our own corners. We can find the version that fits our own perspective, or understand there are different perspectives at work. I still don't like writing about this on the grounds that I don't understand fully except from my own attempt at getting a fuller perspective, but understand how my blogging "muses" set me up--sometimes I have to write about a thing whether I like it or not to have that topic out, and I can't move on until I just get the story out of my system.

The way I see it with the Covington Catholic kids is pretty similar to what Steve M. wrote, although my perspective is from Philadelphia, twenty years later. The thing you learn in a city with diversity or various viewpoints is that not everything is about you, concerns you, or needs you to confront it. You can be called a blue-eyed devil whore, and that's just some shit someone has to say about you because they are working out their demons in public, where about a hundred other people can also see them being ugly, and you not listening. There is no reason to call out or call back. The Covington Catholic kids were confronted by the Black Hebrew Israelites, and had no reference for how to not confront them. They weren't ever told this kind of provocation existed. These kids never took a downtown subway somewhere, I guess. They were going to be unnecessarily confrontational, and it looked like there were no adults who would tell them not to do this.(Not to turn the other cheek? Even if there was a pretty solid Christian basis for not starting shit, the chaperones weren't trying to be about it.) Nathan Phillips thought he was peacefully intervening because from his point of view, these young people needed their attention turned away from the negative energy the BHI were bringing and hoped they would be respectful of his prayerful positive energy.

But they didn't know how to confront that, either. These were, to them, just other people of color acting weird at them, and they could not determine if this was a threat or on their side, and not knowing how to just not react, they behaved with ignorance, because that was what they had.

I'm not going to say they were necessarily behaving hatefully right there, because I don't think they knew how they would be seen. They didn't react as if they would be seen, even though many phone-camera angles captured them. I think they behaved ignorantly, because this is what they had. A lot of crappy white behavior (me just speaking as a white person) probably boils down to ignorance. This is sometimes called "Hanlon's razor": Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Because I work for the government, I have had to make myself very much aware of how this variation on Occam's Razor really works.

But there is ignorant, and there is ignorant. These kids are mostly white (except for the one unfortunate who the BHI called a slur), and so are all of the faculty at their school, from what I understand. They are surrounded by whiteness to the exclusion of knowing how to deal with diversity, and with Catholic teaching such that they were there, all teenage boys, to protest against adult women having options for their own reproductive health. And possibly even being ignorant to passing women because of that idea. And wearing explicitly political gear to demonstrate their unity as if not understanding how Trump paraphernalia is received, not as just a political statement, but a racial and misogynistic statement.

The very nicest thing I can say about these kids is that they were in a situation where they did not know what to do, and did not know how their MAGA hats made them look worse, and that many extremely online people have ascribed to them a maturity and situational awareness about how racist they were being that they did not actually possess. They are kids, and I think they should be aware of more than their background has given them, and should be able to learn and grow from this experience, not be shunned and screwed up and have their learning curve cut off because the people around them have circled the wagons. That seems really dumb, and I want all people to just experience life to the fullest, by being properly prepared to experience diversity and learn how to be respectful when the moment happens. Like these kids didn't learn, but still could.

Rick Santorum is Wrong on All the Science Things

So, I guess the idea that former Senator Rick Santorum is an anti-intellectual is pretty much "old hat" by now, right?  But do you know how far out of his way wrong he's willing to be for the business interests that exist in and around Rick Santorum without openly paying for his ass like Foster Fries would?  Seriously?

Pretty damn far. Steve M. picks up on where Sen. Santorum would respectfully suggest that the Pope leave science to the scientists. Notwithstanding that the Pope is trained in science.  The science is pretty much determined. And that Rick Santorum himself is just some wanker who got elected to office on a fluke.  And hasn't since been in office for awhile--but he wants to tangle with the currently popular Pontiff?  That's some cheek! That's some face!

That's some backpfifengesicht. The earth is warming, India has melting roads  Alaska is in the 90's F even if it isn't but June.

Climate change is real. It just is.

They were so Pro-life, they let her Die for a Heartbeat.

So, here's a thing that the pro-life contingent did, recently--they basically killed this 31-year old dentist and wife by not terminating a failing pregnancy. See, because her fetus, which was being expelled from her body, still presented with a heartbeat, her doctors would not end her pregnancy.

“The doctor told us the cervix was fully dilated, amniotic fluid was leaking and unfortunately the baby wouldn’t survive.” The doctor, he says, said it should be over in a few hours. There followed three days, he says, of the foetal heartbeat being checked several times a day. 

“Savita was really in agony. She was very upset, but she accepted she was losing the baby. When the consultant came on the ward rounds on Monday morning Savita asked if they could not save the baby could they induce to end the pregnancy. The consultant said, ‘As long as there is a foetal heartbeat we can’t do anything’. 

“Again on Tuesday morning, the ward rounds and the same discussion. The consultant said it was the law, that this is a Catholic country. Savita [a Hindu] said: ‘I am neither Irish nor Catholic’ but they said there was nothing they could do. 

“That evening she developed shakes and shivering and she was vomiting. She went to use the toilet and she collapsed. There were big alarms and a doctor took bloods and started her on antibiotics.

They ignored the very real, and very alive, and very aware, and very traumatized, woman in front of them, because they were so-called Christian, and thought there was this heartbeat.  This still-alive but dying fetus, and that took precedence over her 31 years of life.  As if she never was.  And they let that baby die inside her. They gave her antibiotics as if it was sepsis alone and not a dying baby that was killing her. and then. when it was probably too damn late, but not a second before that little heart stopped beating, they finally decided to remove the corpse of her dead baby. Her baby.

The Catholic Church doesn't give a shit. If you have a womb, you live and die by it. That's what she got told, and herself not Catholic. Her body, ridden with a preventable disease  died because her life was secondary to a heartbeat. All she was. All she ever was. The child of her parents, the spouse of her husband. A young professional. A friend. And because someone heard a heartbeat--she was Nobody.  A womb with an inconvenient history. A toss-away.  A discard.

Don't anyone ever tell me "pro-life" means anything like "in favor of the living" when a young woman can die for the sin of getting pregnant. Don't anyone ever tell me that the pro-life position is anything but misogynist when this is how a woman dies--because a heartbeat took precedence over all of her existence, everything she ever meant to her loved ones. Everything she ever wanted for herself. And she did speak for herself, and she did try and tell them what she wanted for her body--to live!

But alas. Pro-life!  She was only the mother, so she had to die. And her dead baby had to die before anyone would listen to the sad likes of her.

So here is just one of the many examples of my anger about things like this abominable heartbeat amendment in Ohio. How many people, not Catholic, nor any kind of evangelical, might find themselves screwed out of being able to chose what to do with their bodies, by their government? By what right does the government purport to own a woman's body? No matter who votes to say they do? Is a woman property? To whom does she owe her labor?And how many women might die because of it, or be injured, or be very much poorer for having a child, not that would kill them, but that they simply could not physically, fiscally, emotionally, realistically, afford to raise?

Women deserve to be heard, to be treated as people--to have precedence over a mere heartbeat. To be able to choose to live, and to choose the life that benefits them and the children they either have or will have. Anything less could hardly be called "pro-life". Because women are so people. And they are so alive. And they should not be the victims of their fertility.

Just look away.

One little thought about the continuing objections the American Bishops might have to the requirement that birth control be covered under all insurance plans free of charge:

The main form of birth control that the padres seem to find objectionable appears to be what is referred to as "The Pill", although nowadays, we have several pills. Almost all of them have been utilized in one way or another, to regulate periods, assuage dysmenorrhea, endometriosis, PCOS, and the like.  In other words, the "Pill" or "Pills" is/are really just a pharmaceutical application to remedy some aspect of reproductive system health. Because so many possible reasons for use of the pill exist--one might well ask: does any employer, having for whatever reason discovered their employee is taking some pharmaceutical known to be used as birth control, within their rights to deny coverage for this medication? Is it even their business?  Must the details of all pharmaceutical use be brought to the attention of an employer?

I think we're getting into treacherous territory with this thought. Is it the right of a Catholic employer to actively try to provide a barrier for their employee to what is in their eyes "sin"--but run the risk of causing a greater harm by denying necessary care? Maybe it makes more sense to "just not know".  In other worse, allow access to the medical care without the assumption that they know why any person might be receiving it--look the other way, in other words.

The church looked the other way over child abuse for so many years, for example.

One wonders.