Benedict, Benedict, Benedict — you wacky pontiff. You don’t really get out much, do you?
Joseph Alois Ratzinger, better known to the mindless as Pope Benedict XVI and to the geekful as Pope Sidious, got his job largely as a sympathy fuck after years of faithful and ruthless service under JPII. “He’s almost 80, for fuck’s sake,” they said; “Give him the job and shut him up already. Do you really want to sit around and listen to him bitching until he’s dead?” In a way, I don’t blame them. The Catholic Church is not exactly short on time.
Benedict XVI is a shriveled-up, hate-mongering bastard who has no understanding of reality whatsoever. He has no idea how real people live in the real world and if he did he would have zero compassion for anyone anyway. He is a conservative’s conservative, going even further than JPII did in his totalitarian mind-set. He is flatly opposed to anything that would be of any real benefit to anyone, honestly, and if there really were a God, and that God was his boss, the first thing you’d have heard the day after they put him in the big chair was a resounding, heavenly YOU’RE FIRED! that would have made Donald Trump’s rug spin in sheer delight like a Three Stooges gag.
Benedict, flush with his successful reversal of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson’s excommunication and Benedict’s own subsequent denials of knowledge that the man had been excommunicated for being what to me is tantamount to a Nazi-sympathizing douchebag (yeah, okay, Benedict — you aren’t even bothering to try, are you), has deigned to grace the continent of Africa with the papal presence. It is his first visit.
Now, you would think that after the Williamson fiasco the papal handlers would have tried to coach him a bit on at least faking it enough to keep the fact that he’s a walking pile of raw sewage from being too glaringly obvious to the public at large, but no — the first thing Benedict did after his nifty red-leather-clad toes hit the dirt in this benighted land of woe, death, disease and war was to reiterate his edict against the usage of condoms.
Yes, in a country where HIV/AIDS has ravaged more people than anywhere else in the world, where the papal voice speaks with momentous authority, this man of God has seen fit to counsel these people against the usage of condoms because — and this is their rule — sex for any reason besides procreation is a sin.
Apparently urging people to engage in life-threatening activities without properly protecting themselves is not a sin, though. As long as you’re fucking to make babies, what? God will protect you from AIDS? Is this the message? If that’s the truth and God protects the righteous, then why, as another commentator pointed out, does Benedict go nowhere without an armed security detail? Surely God would protect the pope, his representative here on Earth, the one human being through whom he inflicts his holy will, from the dangerous madmen who would seek to cause him harm? Why don’t you ditch that crack armed detail, Ben, old boy? God will protect you!
No?
Yeah, I didn’t think so. But it’s perfectly acceptable for this monstrous hypocrite to condemn these people to horrible, prolonged death, though. That’s okay, because condoms are a sin, and if you do happen to die at least you’ll go to Heaven because you didn’t wear one of those filthy, God-flouting sperm catchers on the end of your willie. Got it? Me either.
I don’t know — maybe it’s just me, but why anyone with even the barest modicum of intelligence and self-respect would listen to anyone like that is simply beyond comprehension. These people need help. They are drowning in a sea of hopelessness. The spiritual leader of the Catholic faith chugs out to them in his golden tugboat and what does he throw them? An anchor. That’s kind of tantamount to the gentle shepherd protecting his flock by hiring a bunch of starving wolves to help him guard the perimeter.
How this man can live with himself stopped being a question I kept asking a long time ago. However he manages it, it’s clear that he manages well. What I still can’t get past, though, is why anyone listens to him in the first place — and not only listens but defends him. Why does this man hold any sense of real power or importance anymore? Why does his faith, or any other, continue to hold such sway over the human population of this planet? The small good they influence is so far outweighed by the havoc and devastation they wreak that it’s just mind-blowing to me that it can continue as long as it has.
You know, you can believe what you want to believe. I’ll defend your right to believe it, even if I think you’re a weak-minded asshole. It’s not my business to tell you what to think, even if I spend my time telling you why I think you’re wrong to think it.
I draw the line, though, when what you think becomes harmful or dangerous to other people. I have to admit here think that I think the pope going to Africa and telling people not to wear condoms because it’s a sin is one of the worst moral transgressions I’ve ever heard of for someone speaking in any capacity, much less the pope doing it in the name of God. People are not going to stop fucking because the pope told them it’s a sin, but they’ll find it very easy to fuck without a condom because there are probably only six condoms on the entire continent of Africa anyway, and four of them are used already.
There are more than 22 million people in Africa who are infected with HIV. There are more than a million and a half deaths from HIV/AIDS every year in Africa. There are more than 11 million children in Africa who have been orphaned because of this disease. This disease which is easily spread through unprotected sex — such as sex without condoms. Condoms have been proven to greatly reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. And this happy jackass wanders off to Cameroon and makes a papal declaration of death in the name of his pointy gold hat and the big cheese in the sky.
People are going to listen to him. They are going to use him as an excuse to negate the education and advice of the health and relief organizations who have been tirelessly working in their country to try to stop and stem and reverse this campaign of monstrous, fatal stupidity on behalf of the Catholic church and the Bush administration, among others. Man, many Africans will listen to the pope before they listen to the health worker who cautions them earnestly because they foolishly, blindly, stupidly believe that the pope speaks for God, and that God speaks through the pope. And they will get sick and they will die and their children will continue to be orphaned by the millions.
I wonder what Benedict would do if those 11 million children showed up on his doorstep, many of them ravaged by HIV/AIDS themselves, holding up their wooden bowls in their rotting fingers and asking for more gruel. He’d probably ignore the corpses before his door until they were forcibly pointed out to him and then act surprised that they’re there and claim no prior knowledge. Hey, it worked for the Nazi, right?
He won’t do it, but Benedict needs to issue an immediate apology and reversal of his edict. But more importantly, people need to fucking snap out of this shit already and come to their senses and stop giving this man and this organization its power. It’s time to grow up and put your little invisible security blanket away and join the real world and do more than pray for once in your fucking life. This man is a poisonous asshole, and if you listen to him and believe that he should have any power or authority of any kind, if you support the same faith – remember, he’s the boss – then so are you. You can’t be half-Catholic. If you recognize the pope, you’re every bit as much of a hate-mongering tool as he is. That’s really all there is to it.
If Benedict is uninterested in helping humanity, then he needs to STFU and go back to his insular little world and write more sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic tracts until he’s dead. But for real just desserts I’d like to see him contract a rousing case of AIDS himself and live to see himself waste away little by little until there’s nothing left of him but his hatred and his bones and his yellow, scaly skin. Maybe then he’d find out what it would be like to be on the other side of his fuckery for once in his miserable, selfish life.
Hey, a girl can dream, cant she? After all — it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
