Billo is pissy because people aren’t giving the Pope a free pass anymore:
Oh, where to begin with all this?
First of all, while I’m no fan of Bill Maher, he did crack me up with his jokes comparing and contrasting the “Yearning For Zion” fundie-Mormon polygamist compound in Texas to the Catholic Church’s own kid-diddling scandals. The former gets a pounce, while the latter gets a pass. What’s the difference? Well: it’s not actually about “volume, volume, volume”, so much as it is about official sanctioning of pedophilia and pederasty. That’s what was so funny about the joke. Apparently, the Church’s official standing as a Religion (though, if you ask me, it often behaves more like a cult) makes it immune to governmental raids.
Now, here’s where the contrast kicks in.
The fundie-Mormon cult is built around marrying off girls as soon as they get their first periods and then breeding them like cattle until they go menopausal or drop dead, whichever comes first. They claim you don’t get to heaven unless you submit to every dictate of the “prophet”, who arranges marriages between the pick of the girls and his most trusted male followers. Any man who incurs the wrath of said “prophet”, however, will find himself stripped of wives and children; they get handed off to a better ass-kisser. The precious children grow up hopelessly confused about their own parentage and are thus forced to have no loyalties except to the “prophet”. Treasures in heaven? More like hell on Earth, especially for the girls when the menstrual moon appears in their skies. And something pretty close to it for all the “lost boys” who get kicked out of the compound to ensure an excess of females for all the old codgers to hoover up. Those boys at least are free once evicted, though many of them wind up as welfare cases with psychiatric needs. But what really is unconscionable is the way the FLDS “church” sucks on the public tit at every chance it can get, considering how it preaches “self-sufficiency” and all that cal. Not only do “lost boys” wind up on welfare, but so do a lot of “plural wives”, who draw public assistance only to turn the cash over to their tyrannical husbands and the tithe-hungry “prophet”. Then they often go dumpster-diving to scrounge up enough to feed their ever-growing broods. (There is also the little matter of the FLDS connection to the highly lucrative Military-Industrial Complex, about which I’m sure we haven’t heard the last.)
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, doesn’t officially sanction child-molestation, but it does have a long-standing unofficial pattern of sweeping it under the rug. Priests suspected of having their hands in children’s pants have long been shuffled off to other parishes to avoid prosecution and/or scandal. They’ve stopped short of actually whipping out a new broom and sweeping the offenders straight out of the church. And here’s where Billo’s disingenousness really comes into its own: The man who handed out all the brooms and gave the orders to sweep the damaged kiddies under the rug is none other than the former Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. And since he is officially infallible (no kidding, folks, it’s church doctrine!), he is above reproach.
Billo, who is Catholic himself (in spite of his own little sex scandal), takes the tack of “how dare they criticize Pope Benedict when these scandals happened under his wimpy old much-too-liberal predecessor!” He forgets that while the orders to sweep came from the Vatican, the actual duty of handing-out-brooms was that of the aforementioned former chief inquisitor. He also forgets that the YFZ cultists themselves consider the raid on their Texas compound to be on the level of a raid on the Vatican.
So when Billo gets all bilious about how the Pope is supposed to get a free pass from an obsequious media (unlike that evil Rev. Wright, whose evility has been 24/7 news on every channel for HOW many weeks now?), we really have to ask: WHY? He has hardly endured excessive scrutiny for this; in fact, he has hardly endured scrutiny for this at all. The only people who endure less scrutiny for their sex scandals are…well, have a look at this site. They’ve been getting a free pass for that, just as much as Israel has been getting free passes for its increasing slide into the very fascism its founders supposedly vowed never to let happen again.
As for Muslim sex scandals, I’m sure there must be plenty. Unfortunately, I don’t read Arabic, so I’m not up on what’s going on in the part of the world that does. (Perhaps a Muslim friend would care to shed some light?) But for Billo to say that they all should get equal castigation now, when it’s not Muslim or Jewish leaders paying an official visit to the White House, is frankly ridiculous. And it smells of ass-covering for an institution whose bare buttocks have gotten a free pass for long enough already.
