Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

The Pope got himself in hot water instead of holy water over the weekend when he used a derogatory term for gay men at a meeting of bishops.
 
Francis apologized later. “The Communion wine was flowing. It was just locker-room talk,” he said. Of course, he said it in Latin. *
 
A lot of people were surprised that the kindly old Pope, who had previously welcomed gays and atheists into Heaven, harbored this streak of homophobia in his soul. No one was more surprised than the anonymous gay bishop who ratted him out to the press, is the guess here.
 
The Pope was complaining about the rising number of gay men in Italy’s seminaries, training for future work as God’s anointed. The word he used was the Italian frociaggine, which translates into the English insult “way too faggoty.”
 
The Pope, apparently prefers muscular young studs with nary a gay thought in their heads for future Mass-sayers and Communion-givers. Manly men who don’t mind washing the feet of other men and who can swing a censer like they were throwing a fastball. Men who keep a copy of Field and Stream next to their breviaries. Men who would make gay men weak with lust.
 
These are the kind of dudes the Pope gets off on. Which makes you wonder. But, let me make it clear, I’m not saying the Pope is gay. Although the one before him certainly was.
 
The Pope, at 87, has been around the block. Surely, he knows that the Church has a long history of putting gay men in vestments. In the Irish-American Catholic tradition I was compressed into as a youth, it was considered a necessity. If you had eleven kids, as many families at the time did, with a preponderance of males, you were almost obligated to give one up to the priesthood, and, usually, it was obvious which one.
 
This worked out perfectly for centuries, especially before pedophilia was invented. Catholic wives were left unmolested by the representatives of Christ on Earth, while Catholic husbands could snicker at them behind their backs when they played golf together.
 
But this Pope’s mission has been to scrape the barnacles off the Church of the past two millennia and get it turned around so that people will jump on the Catholic vessel instead of jumping off of it. He has abandoned the traditional Catholic theology of the afterlife, which was that all non-Catholics went to Hell, along with 90%, at least, of all Catholics. This Pope has virtually cancelled Hell. He has said nice things about almost all other religions, even the Jewish one, which the Church used to burn you at the stake for following.
 
So, it was a surprise when the Pope blurted out his preference for brawling heterosexual men to take vows of celibacy and cram themselves into seminaries to minister to Catholic flocks. He may regret this wish if it is granted. Camouflage cassocks may become the rage, so that the new priests can go directly from hunting blinds to preside over morning Mass, and many parishes will install big-screen TVs tuned to ESPN amid the baptismal founts and statues of the saints.
 
With the volume turned down, of course. But at least the faithful will be able to follow the scores.
 
*“Vinum communio fluit. Sicut erat in CAPSA Disputatio. "**
 
**This is the best Google translate could do. I’m not sure the ancient Romans even had locker rooms.

This column wishes to extend to all Americans cordial greetings on this day, celebrated by Christians, poultry, lapin animals and transpeople across the breadth of this nation.
 
While Easter has been around for a while, Transgender Visibility Day has only been celebrated for the last 14 years. This is the first time I’ve heard of it at all, and I probably would have remained agnostic regarding it had not the phases of the moon determined that Easter would be celebrated on the same day as TVD this year.
 
I gained this knowledge because the coincidence has all the avatars of the right and Republicanism in a slobbering fury, mostly at Uncle Joe mentioning it, along with the standard Presidential Easter messaging, because the risen Christ hates transgendered people, I guess. The theology is a little murkier than usual on this one, and that is murky, indeed.

The serial adulterer and part-time Bible salesman who will oppose Biden in November called him a blasphemer. Marjorie Taylor Greene, yipper of hate speech and proponent of genital inspection, accused Biden of “thumbing his nose at God,” and Speaker Mike Johnson, whose penis is so small that transitioning to the other sex would be practically effortless for him, said that Biden had betrayed Jesus Christ. Like Judas, I guess, who doesn’t get enough credit for starting the ball rolling for Easter in the first place, in my opinion.
 
The yowling from other members of the reactionary screeching class has nearly crashed the Internet. They are moaning as if someone kicked them in their birth genitals, bewailing the possibility that a transperson somewhere could be using a church bathroom not assigned to their birth sex on Easter, which would be an abomination sufficient to bring on the apocalypse, where it not already scheduled to coincide with the solar eclipse next week.
 
It should at least spell the end of Biden, for hating on Jesus, even though, in Biblical days, being transgender was a snap. Everyone wore robes and relieved themselves behind the same rock. Judas himself may have been a transgender. Who could tell? The only sex reassignment surgery available was performed by the ruling Romans, who would lop off your nuts with a sword if you didn’t pay your taxes.
 
The source of transgender hatred by the followers of Christ is no doubt the fact that hating regular old gays is no longer fashionable. For decades religious people could scorn gays and have public opinion on their side. Some still do, but many have been shamed by their neighbors into no longer bullying gays or showering them with their curses.
 
In transgenders, they have found a much smaller minority to scorch in the name of Jesus, and one with fewer defenders, because few of us know any transgendered people, no matter how eager we may be to share restrooms with them.
 
But it’s all just a gust of windbaggery, calculated to keep the backwoods demographic voting Republican, for fear the Democrats will unleash a flood of he-she’s onto the good people in the holler, begging to use their outhouses and play on their high school basketball teams.
 
Here in California, it’s Cesar Chavez Day too, but we’re not hearing more than the usual peeping about the Hispanic invaders on this occasion.
 
You can thank a transsexual for that.

George Santos, the first Congressperson publicly booted from the House in twenty years, will make the leap to reality TV by appearing on Dancing with the Stars.
 
It is not easy to get expelled from Congress. According to precedent, two-thirds of the House have to pinch their noses shut and say, “Yick,” when you walk into its chamber.
 
Whether Santos will dance as himself, or as his drag queen alter ego, Imogene Puff-Puff, has not been hashed out between Santos and the show’s producers.
 
Santos is far from the first disgraced or loser politician to appear on DWTS. Sean Spicer came out of the White House shrubbery to do it. Rick Perry sashayed across show’s stage in between stints as a goofball Presidential candidate and placeholder Secretary of Energy. Tom DeLay, former Speaker of the House, showed off his moves on DWTS between his several indictments.
 
What about Sarah Palin? you ask. She appeared on The Masked Singer, you easily confused person, and almost destroyed an entire category of music, rap, when she did. It was her daughter, Bristol, who cut the rug on Dancing. Bristol popped out three kids of her own in an unwed fashion while being a public abstinence advocate and dance contestant. The Alaskan bush banger has two baby daddies, the second of which, Dakota Meyer, is named after two states and a toothpaste manufacturer.
 
Santos presented himself during his candidacy as a Fellow of the Long-Winded Council of Groupthinkers, and a graduate of the Daytona Beach School of Veterinary Medicine and Wind-Surfing, when he really spent those pre-Congress years as a transexual singer in a calypso band in Brazil, and a towel boy at a nude beach in Trinidad. These facts may not be exactly precise—a man gets tired of Googling shit.
 
That misrepresentation was fine with House Republicans, but when Santos was indicted for spending campaign funds on Botox, a used Maserati for an ex, and anal bleaching, it was too much for them, and Santos got the heave-ho.
 
He will probably not be the last Republican pol to prance across the stage at DWTS before fading into irrelevance. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are thinking right now about how good they’d look in sequins if they lose re-election. Matt Gaetz, too.
 
And Tom DeLay may not even be the last former Speaker to prance in the spotlight. You listening, Kevin McCarthy?

In a series of rulings that had people all over the US saying, “STFU! Really?” the Supremes decided to kick a bunch of citizens in the groin, before boarding some friendly billionaire’s private jet to fly off for summer vacation.
 
Gays took it in the nads first, as the Court ruled that it was perfectly okay for web designers to refuse to design webs for them, because God invented the Internet and He hates gay people. This is what Lori Smith of Colorado believes, and she is entitled to that belief under the First Amendment, say a majority of the justices. Lori’s God is the Great Fag Smiter, and while she’s content to wait until Judgement Day for Him to whomp all those gay souls into Hell, in the meantime she’s secured the right to tell gays, “Git out dat door,” if they come to her for web designing.
 
Now, embarrassingly, it has come out that no gays asked Lori to work on their wedding webs anyway; the person named in her suit is straight and a web designer himself, who says he never asked Lori to design for him, since he can design his own web pages. Also, Lori features her motto, “Jesus loves you, unless you’re a homo,” prominently on every page of every web she designs, which some customers find wearying.

​The fact that the harm in this precedent-setting lawsuit was entirely imaginary did not stop the court primitives from eagerly ruling that gay wedding URL’s disgust them nearly as much as they disgust Lori, and if American citizens find gays revolting, they are perfectly free to claim that the Word of God commands them to sneer at the queer.
 
The Court spoke on affirmative action by taking great delight in slamming the doors of the Ivy League shut on black people’s toes, while leaving them wide open for white people whose SAT results are no higher than a nice bowling score, but have names like Whitmore Chillington Terrarium III. Clarence Thomas, who got his current job because of affirmative action by Bush the First, wrote in his concurring opinion, “Ain’t no black folk ever invited me to a private island for golf, lobster tails and a welcome break from looking at my wife’s face. Fuck ‘em.”
 
The Supremes also said no, no, NO to student debt relief, finding it more important that banks continue to get paid even if they have to take it out of people’s Social Security checks, rather than the debtors be able to afford to buy houses and have children and do other things that would insure that America has a future.
 
The Court did all this in the name of the Founding Fathers, who lived when it was considered natural that only rich people were educated, blacks were slaves and being gay just wasn’t an option. A return to Colonial times is what the Six wishes for wistfully. I wonder if, like the FF’s, they all want to wear silk stockings.
 
Under their gowns, of course.

House Bill 233 in the Tennessee House had an innocent beginning. It was just a simple, earnest attempt to re-instate hatred of gays into Tennessee law, a noble effort by the Tennessee legislature to follow the wishes of its constituents, who want to be able to discriminate against gays legally, as well as using the traditional Tennessee tools of gay-hating, like punching them out and hitting them with pickup trucks.
 
The bill would have established a form of contract marriage that GAYS WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO USE.
 
The caps are mine because passing this law would obviously result in a series of expensive lawsuits for the state to defend, which I predict Tennessee would lose. If the state won though, can’t you see Tennessee instituting a special form of marriage that only people of the same race could use?
 
I could, but this smug little package of gay-bashing really hit the national press because the writers of the act forgot to include an age limit in the original legislation, which meant that, while you would still have to be at least seventeen to get a regular marriage license in Tennessee, your grandpa could get contract married to his ten-year old girlfriend once the law passed.
 
Not only could any two middle-schoolers tie the knot, but any fifty-year-old guy with a Tesla could fulfill his dreams by picking up your fifteen-year-old daughter at any mall in the Volunteer State and get hitched to her with no notice to you, except maybe a polite note telling you the name of the hotel the newlyweds planned to stay at during their honeymoon in the Bahamas.
 
The answer to that “What is a woman?” question that Tennessee senator Marcia Blackburn asked Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings would have been answered by the Senator’s very own legislature, and that answer would have been, “Anyone a horny gym teacher thinks is a woman.”
 
Once the story hit social media, though, the bill’s sponsors in the Legislature amended it to close the pedophiliac loophole, and returned the bill to its original sacred purpose, making gay people feel shitty about existing.
 
This the lawmakers of Tennessee would stoutly deny, naturally. They claim they are sponsoring the legislation so that churches in Tennessee that are religiously offended by gay marriage could demand that their marrying customers only use a hetero-exclusive license to get married between their walls, so that their union would be cleansed of any association with gay love.
 
This is a solution in search of a problem, as I cannot imagine any gay Tennesseans with wedlock in mind would want to be married under the baleful eye of the preacher at the Church of Our Lord’s Flowing Waters of Love in the Up Creek Holy Hollow.
 
They have other places to go. Just like Jesus wants.

There are no doubt many complex geopolitical reasons for the war in Ukraine, but no matter how complex or geo they are, they will probably not be solved by shelling kindergartens and hospitals.
 
There is, however, another reason for the war, one not often mentioned, and that reason is waved like a banner by the Russian Orthodox Church, which supports Putin and the war, which is that Ukraine permitted gay pride parades.
 
Patriarch Kirill, the head of that Church and sometimes referred to as the Russian Pope has divided the world into two, unreconcilable camps of nations—those that allow gay pride parades (Ukraine) and those that do not (Russia, where a Moscow court recent upheld that city’s 100-year ban on gay pride events).
 
This is the kind of law and order that really juices up the Patriarch. In his mind, it supersedes all other differences between nations. Democracy vs. authoritarianism, socialism vs. capitalism, rice-eaters vs. potato peelers—all the possible sources of international discord pale compare to the gay pride parade divide, according to Kirill.
 
It’s hardly necessary to say that the Moscow-based Pontiff is way different than the current regular Pope, who is a genial old guy who has already let gays into Heaven, where, one assumes, they can parade eternally. Kirill is much more Old Testamenty, a wrath-of-God type Pope. He dresses the part too. Maybe he hates gays because some of them have criticized his fashion choices. “I wouldn’t wear a kitchen tablecloth with a crucifix stuck through it on my head, girlfriend, but you go,” is something one might hear on Queer Eye for the Orthodox Clergy. Or “That beard that looks like the corpse of a small mammal decaying on the steppes—let’s just sacrifice it to this can of Barbasol.”
 
So, out there in the vasts of Russia, there is a Church that thinks that allowing gays to exist and parade the fact that they do out in the open, is a sacrilege that justifies sending teenage conscripts to shell unarmed civilians. Dead babies and demolished hospitals are the price their God demands to stomp out the sin of gayness, or at least drive it into hiding, kind of like the Soviet Union tried to abolish religion, only to find it couldn’t be done.
 
Same thing going to happen with gay. Count on it, Patriarch.

​In his most earth-shattering announcement since he let atheists into Heaven, the Pope signaled his approval of gay civil unions last week.
 
Mind you, he also said this years ago, when he just wore a cardinal’s pointy hat in Argentina. Mostly the Pope approves of gay civil unions because he doesn’t approve of gay marriage. A real marriage is reserved for a Catholic man and a Catholic woman after they and their family and friends have endured an interminable, fairly expensive ceremony in a Catholic church, followed by a massive party where everyone gets shitfaced. This is the only form of marriage of which God approves. At least that’s what I was told back in the day.

Any other form of marriage, be it Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim, courthouse, shotgun, Vegas wedding chapel or gay, doesn’t count. The nuns who taught me were pretty hard-core about this, as well as being firmly against sex in general, and Catholic boys trying to get it from Catholic girls in particular. Regretfully, in terms of my early love life, they had the Catholic girls mostly on their side in this opinion.
 
But things change. Most of those nuns are dead by now, and if they’re not, they’re nearly as old as the Pope. Now, Francis is not likely to be saying anything like, “Hey, people like to grab each other’s genitals. Whaddya gonna do?”  so he's not going to approve of you meeting another intoxicated person at a bar and clawing each other's clothes off at closing time anytime soon. And he’s especially not going to favor civil unions between a priest and his favorite altar boy.
 
He’s getting heavy criticism from his fellow religious leaders, nonetheless. Soulless fraud Franklin Graham, perhaps jealous because the Catholic Church has been soaking pious peasants for their last penny for centuries while his family has only been doing it for a couple generations, said the Pope was “normalizing homosexuality.” Graham believes that all gays should be living lives of internal torment, squashing their sexuality between shut legs or marrying an opposite sex person so they can both be miserable. Only then will God be happy with them.
 
What makes God happy is a mystery to me. The coronavirus, from all available evidence, just rolls Him, but Graham has different ideas, and the cheerful young guy with the lilt in his voice and a sharp haircut who just brought you your lunch is what pisses Him off, according to Graham, along with abortion, being against the death penalty and the government trying to take away your guns.
 
The Pope is still not cool with abortion, but he’s good with gays and atheists, and he hasn’t given any encyclicals lately on the importance of oversized ammo clips. This is a remarkable evolution on the part of the Church, considering that, back in its heyday, which was before the invention of any size ammo clip, it used the weapons it had, namely wood and fire, to routinely burn Jews, heretics and astronomers at the stake.
 
Or Protestants. Bet the Pope he wishes he could bring that back for Graham.