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The leader of the largest organized ring of child molesters on the planet, Pope Francis, says he’s not going to judge gay priests just for being gay.

Yep. You heard him. Ain’t that nice of him?

Let’s just see how magnanimous this kindhearted reversal really is.

* His church helped cover up the pedophilia scandal, practicing a “geographical cure” which allowed predatory priests to ravage parish after parish, even going against the law to warn priests about to get arrested so they could flee and even now his group is fighting tooth and nail against laws that will help the victims of his friends’ predations.

* His organization has been linked to the Mafia.

* He heads a group linked to the murder of at least one young girl (if not more). His predecessor may well have quit to avoid arrest orders.

* His group can’t even keep their hands clean financially as a bank scandal erupts around them yet again.

* His church thought it was just fine to enslave young women for years as laundresses and browbeat some 150,000 single mothers in Australia into putting their babies up for adoption.

* His group took centuries to even apologize about denying Galileo’s theories, almost burning him at the stake and putting him into house arrest and suppressing him and whatever brilliant discoveries he could have made. Let’s not forget as well that Pope Leo XII formally opposed the smallpox vaccine because he thought this life-threatening disease was a judgement from his god so humans shouldn’t try to stop it! (Update: possibly the story of Leo XII is apocryphal, but see this link regarding an 1885 outbreak of smallpox in Canada that was made considerably worse by Catholic refusal to submit to vaccination: “The Protestant population escaped almost entirely by vaccination; but multitudes of their Catholic fellow-citizens, under some vague survival of the old orthodox ideas, refused vaccination; and suffered fearfully.” They’re sort of all right with vaccinations in general now, kind of. But I’ll give the RCC’s sins a pass on Leo. Thanks for bringing that to my attention!)

* Let’s not even mention the Crusades or the Inquisition, or the Catholic Church’s current efforts to interfere with the rights of women worldwide in the name of a rather sickening perversion of “love.”

He’s got “nothing against gays.”

Well, maybe the world jolly well has something against him and his gang of predators. If he’s hoping the sweet soft-shoe act makes everybody forget the Catholic Church’s various scandals and horrors, he failed miserably. I noticed he didn’t actually give gay people the rights that straight people have. He didn’t say it was okay to be gay. He didn’t imply anywhere that gay people have a right to exist and pursue love and happiness without apology or shame. I heard him loud and clear. Did you?

Nobody cares anymore if he judges us.

What he ought to fear is us judging him.

Because we are.

ROLL TO DISBELIEVE "Captain Cassidy" is Cassidy McGillicuddy, a Gen Xer and ex-Pentecostal. (The title is metaphorical.) She writes about the intersection of psychology, belief, popular culture, science,...