Pope Benedict XVI wants British heads to roll. Oh dear.

A member of Britain’s Foreign Office, in response to what to do with the Pope during his September visit, suggested such activities as opening an abortion clinic and blessing a gay marriage. The young employee, only 23, is being allowed to keep his job, but his superior has been “transferred.” One hopes the word transfer is not in any way akin to the Vatican’s quaintly named Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or, in common parlance, Inquisition.

It is, therefore, doubly laughable that a senior Vatican source was quoted in The Daily Mail as saying, “There are clearly dark forces within the British Government. While some are very eager for the visit to go well, there are others who are opposing it. This runs the risk of the trip being remembered for the memo and nothing else.”

I doubt that. The trip might well be remembered as Benny the Rat trying to shift attention from his egregious cover-ups of pedophilia in the church, all over the church, it seems.

It might be Benny the Rat trying to make the world forget that he rejected US President Barack Obama’s first choice for ambassador to the Vatican, Kathleen Kennedy. Why? Because he didn’t like her sexual politics or, in other words, she favors a woman’s choice.

Senior aides to Benny the Rat said the Foreign Office had been too lenient, and they worried about repercussions that might cancel the visit entirely. They pointed out that the Pope had visited Muslim nations without incident. And why not? As I recall, the Muslims WON the Crusades, so Muslim nations had no particular reason to despise a man who has nothing at all to do with the religion practiced by most of the citizens of those nations.

On the other hand, Britain has several reasons to dislike this pope, or any pope, because of various unsavory portions of its national history.

First, of course, Christianity supplanted the perfectly serviceable religion of the British Isles, Druidry. English scholars have even made a good case for Joseph of Arimathea having brought the young Joshua of Nazareth to study at Glastonbury, among accomplished Druids. And indeed, the teachings of the man who became Jesus were a lot more like the gentle ways of Druid life and worship than they are like the militant, rigid, unforgiving pronouncements of the Roman Church as we know it now, and as we have known it for close on to the entire 2000 years of its nominal existence.

Second, Catholicism produced some mighty aberrations in various monarchs of England. Anyone recall Bloody Mary? The half-sister of Queen Elizabeth I, she murdered anyone who wanted to practice the religion of her father Henry VIII, that is, the burgeoning Anglicanism. Speaking of which…the Pope’s intense desire, at the time, to keep all the kingdoms of Europe lined up as he liked them (under his thrall) is the real reason he denied Hank yet another annulment and sent the syphilitic king on a quest to justify his behavior that resulted in a religious schism. That’s a schism, actually, that many Britons quite like, as do some transplanted Yanks. An American Anglican, that is Episcopalian, I always liked the fact that our own Archbishop of Canterbury, and not the Italian-Polish-German pope, decided on matters of doctrine. Within the Anglican Communion, there is wide latitude for each nation’s church to develop its own way of being.

Third, this is a German Pope. One might recall how intensely the British people suffered at the hands of another German who was easily offended and also thought he ought to be revered in all of Europe and the British Isles. It wouldn’t be surprising if, below the surface, there was a stream of anti-German sentiment bound up in both what the Foreign Office employee wrote, and in feelings across the land generally.

It is difficult for those not brainwashed into the faith to pump up much love for a church that has systematically reduced women to the level of chattel, stopping just short of shrouding them live as the Muslims do. Among the followers of Jesus were many women preachers, in fact; the hierarchy and bureaucracy, not to mention militarism, of the Roman Catholic Church disenfranchised them from the major spiritual role.

It is difficult to feel any admiration for a man who embraced Holocaust deniers among his own clergy. It is difficult to desire to cooperate with a man who only belatedly and only after intense international criticism deigned to acknowledge a problem with pedophilia throughout the Roman Catholic Church.

It is difficult even to understand a Church that could produce the Magdalene Sisters, all the while keeping the true believers in Ireland convinced that the slightest nod toward human sexuality was such a heinous sin that one’s life was, in one way or another, immediately forfeit.

It is difficult to respect a Church that, when its leader is subjecting a sovereign nation already in a recession to bearing the immense public cost of his visit, takes umbrage at an attempt at humor about it by a young employee and calls for his head.

One might not expect a Roman patriarch to be able to take a joke, although it seems that Pope John Paul would have been a bit more laid back about it. Even from a rigid and doctrinaire pontiff, though, one might hope for a more balanced response and a modicum of forgiveness.

Seig Heil! A new phrase for Arizonans to learn

Seig Heil! Is it possible to translate that into Spanish for the legal Arizonans of Hispanic descent who speak Spanish as their first language?

Never mind. They wouldn’t want to say it; a despicable aspect of reverence for the fatherland in Nazi Germany, the phrase means Hail Victory. There is no victory in Arizona, and certainly none for those of Hispanic ancestry, whether recent immigrants or long-time residents.

Indeed, there is victory only for the teabagger mentality, if one cares to elevate the syndrome to the level of mentality. But it does amply explain the recent passage in Arizona of the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”

Under this ridiculous moniker and the law it fails utterly to describe, Dave Zirin, writing on Progressive.org, notes:

THE law makes it a crime to walk the streets without clutching your passport, green card, visa, or state I.D. It not only empowers but absolutely requires cops to demand paperwork if they so much as suspect a person of being undocumented. A citizen can, in fact, sue any police officer they see not (emphasis mine) harassing suspected immigrants. The bill would also make it a class one misdemeanor for anyone to ‘pick up passengers for work’ if their vehicle blocks traffic. And it makes a second violation of any aspect of the law a felony."

There is little doubt that the chances of my visiting Arizona are slim to none; indeed, for any nation to harbor such a state within its national boundaries suggests to me that my choice to become an ex-pat when I did, a year ago and becoming fact six months ago, was a sound decision. There is very little chance I will visit the US, although family and friends are mainly still there.

Several columnists have proposed that the Arizona law was meant simply to force the federal government into enacting workable immigration laws, or, in the case of Arizona, anti-immigration laws. In trolling around the Internet, I came upon the comment that Russell Pearce, a Mormon, was responsible for introducing this law.

Thank goodness I’ve quit examiner.com. When I mentioned in a column for them that the Mormon Church was behind a good deal of the gay-bashing legislation in western states, the number of comments I got―mainly casting aspersions on me―was quite astonishing. I admit that I did mention that Joseph Smith, the founder of the church, was actually a juvenile delinquent looking for a way up and over, and mentioning that, of course, really opened the floodgates. But surprise! I can’t think of any other founders of modern religions who came to their enlightenment (if such one wants to call it in Smith’s case) via criminal activity. Martin Luther was not a criminal; he simply disagreed with many of the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church and had the courage to voice his disagreement publicly.

Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science (no, NOT Scientology), another modern western-states-based religion, was hardly a criminal; he was actually a sort of meek little academic wannabe.

Nor did Luther nor Holmes nor even Henry the VIII, in whose favor the Anglican Church was devolved from Roman Catholicism, claim that their revelations came from golden plates given them by the angel Moroni and later taken back by the same angel and secreted away inside a mountain.

Frankly, Henry VIII’s murderous behavior towards his wives was more sane than that cockamamie tale, if a bit more delinquent.

And now comes, as they say in some courts of law, Russell Pearce, about whom The Economist noted:

RUSSELL PEARCE is the quintessential Arizona Republican. He wears stars-and-stripes shirts and has clips of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan on his website. He loves guns, his family, his Mormon faith, his country and the law, which he enforced for many years as deputy sheriff of Maricopa County. He jokes that being Republican, and thus not having a heart, saved his life when he got shot in the chest once. But his main passion is illegal immigrants, whom he calls ‘invaders’. He loathed them even before his son Sean, also a sheriff’s deputy, got shot by one. But now it is personal."

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I owned a company that was brought to its knees by a thieving gay man. By Russell Pearce’s lights, then, I should have run for office and introduced legislation against gay men, having been grievously harmed by a gay man.

Once upon a time, long ago and far away, I was employed by a company at which my boss was a rabid conservative who was in favor of the death penalty. Why? Not on any ideological grounds, nor even fiscal ones (the usual rant is that it’s expensive to keep a person in jail, despite it being much more expensive to execute them). No, he was a rabid pro-death penalty ignoramus because his wife’s brother had been killed in a drive-by shooting. I was incredulous that a seemingly educated person could so cavalierly translate personal tragedy into a desire for public policy.

Of course, it is much the same when those whose near and dear have died of a particular disease suddenly become the number one flag-waver and friend-annoyer regarding donating/running/walking/sponsoring for the cure of that disease. It would be so much more elegant if these people chose a disease that really freaked them, if a disease they must choose, and work to defeat that. I have had relatives die of heart attacks, pancreatic cancer, extreme old age (101) and kidney failure. If I had to choose one to make a cause out of, it would be extreme old age. After all, I’d like to wipe that out as a cause of death and live forever.

But in fact, I think the worst disease is ignorance. One can literally either survive everything else, or die knowing one has put up the good fight. And since we are all going to die sometime―since my favorite disease has not been wiped out and I can’t think what to do to help with that except try to live longer than 101―one might as well stop being ignorant and put up the good fight.

I would tell Pearce to stop being ignorant, but I think he’s got a terminal case. I would tell the Mormon Church to stop being ignorant, but that would be so non-PC, lord knows what the outcome would be. And it seems to have two longevity factors going for it: first, it has reached that critical mass after which any bureaucracy will self-perpetuate, and, second, it brainwashes people into doing completely irrational things in its name.

Meanwhile, there’s no chance I will go to Arizona. There’s very little chance I will return to the United States, even for a visit.

But there’s also no chance I’ll stop commenting on it, just so that maybe, someday, the United States will return to being the nation it was meant to be, the nation seemingly permanently hijacked by Ronald Reagan and his progeny in crime.

Teabaggers, mullahs brothers under the skin

Yesterday, I posted a column on examiner.com about Geico firing Lance Baxter for having the temerity to express his displeasure about their tactics to a teabagger organization. I used the term teabagger. Just like that. No quotes.

I was instantly attacked by teabaggers. At first, it appeared in the stats available to me that 27 of 33 readers had made comments, 26 negative and one positive.

In the light of day, it turns out that the column received so many hits that it landed in the top five of examiner.com’s hundreds of blogs for the day.

Nonetheless, that does not overturn my decision to quit writing for examiner.com.

Firstly, the site has become increasingly right wing.

Secondly, I was asked to use quotes around the word teabagger if I used it in future. Teabagger is an English word. It means someone who fills little sacks of paper with crushed tea leaves. Apparently, it also has other meanings, meanings I was not aware of―not hanging out with the lowest of the nation’s teenagers―when I first used the term in print…as does everyone else up to and including Huffington Post and the New York Times. But I refuse to be intimidated by the terrorism of mental midgets.

Thirdly, I am so sick and tired of pandering to the cockamamie political correctness demands of people with sick minds and sicker spirits that I’m more than happy to shift my attentions to my own website/blog, where I can do as I please. Mind you, there are terms that are disgusting and demeaning in all contexts that I will not use. The N word is one. The C word is another…although I hasten to add, that is basically a societal expectation. British comedian Frankie Boyle uses the C word in reference to women all the time and no one thinks anything of it. It’s locker room humor, and he is a locker room humorist, although he is generally using that humor to point up real ills in British society.

I am often, in England, treated to the phrase, “took the Mick out of him/her.” It did surprise me the first time I heard it, being a Mick myself and realizing that in America, only other Micks will use Mick, as only African-Americans will use the N word among themselves. And, as I would imagine, other ethnic people would use the pejorative terms among themselves. It comes down to, “I can call my mother names, but you can’t.”

Fair enough.

But what about Mick in England? After all, the Brits subjugated the Irish for quite a long time. Ah, sure then isn’t it just a wee wordeen we’re speaking about? Isn’t it just another way to say a person was having a bit of fun? I customarily call my husband a Limey…which we have fun with because he has a Gin and Tonic every single night with, naturally, a slice of lime in it. I don’t think he’d drink it without the slice of lime. Granted, the term came about because British sailors ate limes at sea to prevent scurvy. That was pretty smart, yes? It could even be argued, on that basis, that Limey is an honorific word for a Brit.

But back to teabaggers. I seriously doubt that more than a handful of them really care about the sexual connotations of the term. Surely, unless they were courting discord from the outset (and that is possible), they didn’t know the other term when they started taping teabags to their hats and carrying signs with racial and gender insults on them, not to mention hurling same at members of Congress about to vote for Mr. Obama’s health care bill. But, true to any terrorist organization, when they found that they had a weapon to use, even if that weapon was ludicrously unallied with anything substantive in question, they pounced upon it like it was a hoard of GOP gold, and are (please excuse mixed metaphors) milking it for every ounce of mileage they can get out of it against any person or organization who will bow down and kiss their mud-splattered feet.

I don’t care for the taste of mud. I don’t care for the teabaggers. I also don’t care if they pray over me for my own good, as they put it, so that I might better come to the realization that they are right. When, in my examiner.com column’s comments, I noted that praying for someone without asking permission is hostile and arrogant (how do they know what my religion or beliefs might be, or anyone’s?), they accused me of not being polite, of rejecting a kindness.

If they were interested in polite, why didn’t they ask me if I’d like to be prayed over? If they were interested in kindness, why did they threaten me with more mayhem when, by removing my column, I denied them the opportunity to hijack it for their own purposes?

In the same way, they tore Lance Baxter apart through both character and career assassination, and at the end of their maneuvers, they wished him a nice day. (Please click here to see a video of how Baxter handled it.)

The Hallmarking of America is complete! On another day, I’ll investigate the ludicrous habit of telling everyone you speak with on the phone every time you do so that you love them. My own stepdaughter told me once that it was because that person might die without knowing how you felt. Frankly, if people you love don’t pretty much know how you feel, one tossed off “love ya” won’t cut it. They’d better know by your deeds and behavior toward them. And if you don’t love them, then it’s bogus and unethical to begin with. But, as I said, that’s a subject for another day.

I can assure you that when the teabaggers threatened to paper the Internet with screen shots of my column (which I took down to avoid complying with a directive I regard as bogus in both an editorial and ideological sense) and the comments (which I also took down), and topped it off with a prayer, they were in no way interested in my spiritual health or immortal soul. What they were interested in, plain and simple, was intimidating me to get their own way. A way they have arrogantly decided, like so many neoNazis (another term to which they object all the while behaving like Nazis and not being smart enough to see it), is the one true way.

The one true way, as I see it, is to firmly and unerringly stand up to bullies and terrorists, whether they are a bunch of retirees with too much taxpayer money in their pockets, too much time on their hands and too little brain in their heads, or Islamic clerics issuing fatwas.

As they say in Brooklyn, same difference.