Artwork via JEREMYBINNS.COM
BY WARREN LIPKA As you may have heard, the pope met in secret with Kim Davis some time before he came to Philly. Jesus H. Christ! That’s like the pope meeting with the bus driver that told Rosa Parks to stand up or get off the bus. What’s next, the pope met with George Zimmerman? We are not but three days out from all the peace, love and understanding of #popeadelphia and now I’m picturing Kim Davis, red-faced, crying her eyes out, mouth open fish-like, holding hands with the pope. Jesus Chysler! I just threw up in my soul a little bit.
Remember Popeadelphia? It was a beautiful thing. Nearly a million people together in one place and almost nobody was an asshole for a change. The cops didn’t kill any unarmed black guys. Nobody blew themselves up in a crowd. There was no angry loner with a rifle on the fifth floor of the school book depository, or if there was he held his fire. There were no car bombs or truck bombs or any kind of bombs. The media ignored Donald Trump. Local favorites like WaWa provided enough pallets of bottled water to keep everyone pissing clear while waiting at Jefferson Station. There were huge viewing screens throughout the city for all of those who did not have a ticket to see the pope say things like, “We remember the great struggles which led to the abolition of slavery, the extension of voting rights, the growth of the labor movement, and the gradual effort to eliminate every kind of racism and prejudice directed at successive waves of new Americans.”
Then Pope Francis had to go and make it weird. Turns out the whole time he was here the pope had a terrible secret he kept from everyone, because like the Lord, popes work in mysterious ways. Her lawyer said that the pope thinks what Kim Davis did was courageous. He says the pope held her hand and told her that. This is confusing. What exactly did he consider courageous? That she stood up to two men who love each other and want to commit to each other for life, in sickness and in health, until death do they part and said, in so many words ‘Not on my watch, faggots!’ This is what the pope is applauding? A woman who confuses ‘religious freedom’ with the right of a public official, and elected judge no less, to discriminate against people whose religious beliefs, or lack thereof, she doesn’t like? If Jesus came back today and saw this he would never stop vomiting.
The pope is savvy man, a political creature who knows how to use the media to his advantage, when to let the cameras in (when he’s kissing babies or washing the feet of the poor) and when to keep them out (when he’s giving Archbishop Chaput a wink and a nod and a pat on the back for fighting any change in PA law that would allow victims of priest rape more time to sue their abusers). He knows that a meeting with Kim Davis will be a big deal and deliver a powerful message. What is his message? It was a reminder. People forget that he is the head of the largest anti-gay organization in the world, a vast and gilded empire of homophobia. Now they will remember.