I find it very fitting that a president who has worked steadfastly for eight years to shatter any notion of a separation between religion and government is rolling out the red carpet for the pope. In fact, from the looks of it, the pope's upcoming stop here in America will be less like a traditional visit by a foreign figurehead and more like an orgy of dogma:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The leader of the world's 1 billion Roman Catholics has been to the White House only once in history.
That changes this week, and President Bush is pulling out all the stops: driving out to a suburban military base to meet Pope Benedict XVI's plane, bringing a giant audience to the South Lawn and hosting a fancy East Room dinner.
These are all firsts.
Bush has never before given a visiting leader the honor of picking him up at the airport. In fact, no president has done so at Andrews Air Force Base, the typical landing spot for modern leaders.
A crowd of up to 12,000 is due at the White House on Wednesday morning for the pope's official, pomp-filled arrival ceremony. It will feature the U.S. and Holy See anthems, a 21-gun salute, and the U.S. Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. Both men will make remarks before their Oval Office meeting and a send-off for his popemobile down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Personally, if the man responsible for covering up rampant sexual abuse in the Catholic Church paid a visit to my house, I certainly wouldn't give him a 21-gun salute. I'd give him 2 seconds to leave and 1 finger for his trouble. I'd tell this "holy man" that a free society has no interest in his rabid and vocal opposition to such radical and inhuman ideas as practicing birth control, or his opinion that homosexuality is "an intrinsic moral evil."
Seriously. Millions of homosexuals in America, and we're giving full military honors to the guy who says they're all going to burn in hell. To recap: Gays are immoral, but we still need to investigate (secretly) whether touching small children is wrong. Praise the lord!
But don't worry, Bush has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the fawning welcoming committee (warning: the following quote may cause spontaneous head explosion):
"One, he speaks for millions. Two, he doesn't come as a politician; he comes as a man of faith," Bush told the EWTN Global Catholic Network in an interview aired Friday. He added that he wanted to honor Benedict's conviction that "there's right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies."
Wait, did he just say the path to freedom involves rejecting the philosophy that different societies should be able to set their own moral standards? Of course he did.
You know, as long as we're on the topic of hope, I really hope somebody takes the pope's fascist moral compass and shoves it right up his pope ass. Wouldn't that be ironic?
No comments:
Post a Comment