Moderation in the Age of Faith; or, So Many Heretics, So Few Inquisitors

When the historian Carlo Ginzburg died last week, I decided to look at his early book The Cheese and the Worms.  I'm not sure when I'll read the whole thing, but I was gobsmacked by something in the translators' foreword.

Furthermore, while moral justice was impossible in a context where the Catholic Church felt, together with virtually all other secular and religious authorities on both sides of the Alps, that it had the right, even the duty, to persecute those who differed in their religious beliefs, legal justice in sixteenth-century terms was dispensed by the Roman Inquisition. It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.

This didn't reassure me.  They conceded that moral justice was impossible in that historical and cultural context, but insisted that the persecution of those who differed in their religious beliefs could be done without capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, or abuse of human rights.  This was "an essentially moderate code of law" because people were persecuted uniformly. The Nazis made similar claims, with as much validity; or if that's too extreme for you, so did Dante for his Hell, or the architects of the US invasion of Vietnam.

Then, just a couple of paragraphs later, the translators added:

A permanent and indispensable member of every inquisitorial court was the notary (or a cleric deputized to assume this function), who transcribed in writing as the legal manuals required “not only all the defendant’s responses and any statements he might make, but also what he might utter during the torture, even his sighs, his cries, his laments and tears” (E. Masini, Sacro Arsenale [Genoa, 1621], p. 123).

"During the torture."  Well!  As long as the torture was transcribed by a notary or a properly deputized substitute, the procedure was "not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible."  This technocratic amorality is impressive, and what's more, I don't understand why the translators felt it necessary to write this apologia for it in the second half of the twentieth century.

I then opened my copy of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a revised edition published in 1970. The book is widely acclaimed and often cited. I read it long ago, in the 1980s, and I'd been meaning to find a passage that made a very strong impression on me back then. It's mainly about the Brothers of the Free Spirit, a movement that spread over much of Europe for more than a century despite the Inquisition's determined campaign to wipe it out.  I found the passage I wanted more easily than I expected:

Brussels continued to harbour Brethren of the Free Spirit. In 1410 the Bishop of Cambrai appointed two inquisitors to extirpate what was still called ‘Bloemardinne’s heresy’; but they found themselves helpless in the face of the popular enthusiasm. Songs were sung after them in the streets and attempts were even made upon their lives.

Songs were sung after them in the streets!  Attempts were even made on their lives!  This demonstrated to Cohn how wicked the Free Spirit were, and how gullible the masses were to fall for their evil teachings, which Cohn presented as the precursors of later Communism and Marxism. (As usual, he neglected to notice that those teachings had their origin in the New Testament.) When The Pursuit of the Millennium was first published in 1957, Nazism was still fresh in adults' memories, the Cold War was in full swing, and Cohn's contemporaries were sure that Elvis Presley's hips were sucking modern youth into the same mass insanity. What I thought when I read it was that it was entirely reasonable and to be expected that torturers and murderers whose methods would later be used by Stalin and the Third Reich would encounter popular resistance when they swaggered into town.  

This long section of Cohn's book consists largely of a litany of heretics who were burned alive by the Inquisition. Here are a couple of examples out of many.

During eighteen months’ imprisonment Marguerite steadfastly refused to purchase absolution by recantation. In 1310 her book was condemned by a committee of theologians; and she herself was excommunicated and sentenced to death by burning. This woman seems to have had many followers, for some months after her death Clement V was bidding the inquisition at Langres to proceed with vigour against the heretics who were multiplying there so rapidly that they were becoming a grave danger to the faith....

The heretics of Cologne had found a remarkable leader in a certain Walter, who came from Holland and who had already been active as a missionary at Mainz. This man was a preacher of great eloquence and persuasiveness; and he wrote various tracts in German which circulated secretly amongst his followers. In the end he was caught; and having refused under the worst tortures to betray his associates or to recant he was burnt. According to one source Walter was an apostate priest, and the head of a large secret group which was captured by a ruse in 1325 or 1327. As many as fifty Brethren of the Free Spirit are said to have been executed on that occasion, some by burning and some by drowning in the Rhine.

But not to worry, a notary or a deputized clerk was no doubt present to record everything Marguerite and Walter said under torture, so everything was done decently and in order.

One more anecdote. These heretics didn't just worry the Roman Catholics, the Protestants agreed that they must be eliminated. 

To counter these activities, the French Protestant community in Strasbourg sent one of their ministers to Tournai, where however he was caught by the Catholic authorities and burnt.

You see, the Inquisition didn't discriminate: all mortal threats to the Christian faith must be extirpated. And I imagine that if the Free Spirit had acquired enough institutional power, they'd have returned the favor.  It was out of this context, and the religious wars that followed, that freedom of religion became an ideal and a founding principle of the American republic. As Ginzburg's translators say, such freedom wasn't a virtue in Europe before that; Catholics and Protestants agreed that it was their duty to punish those who held different religious beliefs. At most each side wanted toleration for itself.

I suppose I should reread The Pursuit of the Millennium and, if possible, Cohn's 1975 book on the struggle against European witchcraft, Europe's Inner Demons.  As I recall, Cohn was as confused about that issue as most academics were at the time - were the witches mentally ill, or were they really worshipping the Devil? it didn't occur to them that if anyone was mentally ill, it might have been the Inquisitors. Not that I think so either: the medicalization of evil is not an improvement on treating it as a sin. As Hugh Trevor-Roper said in his essay on the European witch-craze, the complex demonology that gave the witch-hunters an ideology for their campaign was a triumph of Reason comparable to Aquinas' philosophical work. (Remember: Garbage In, Gospel Out!)  But that's for another day.

The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

Alone and Palely Loitering

Before I start picking on Barry Walters's Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000 (Viking, 2026), I want to stress its virtues. Walters is a longtime music journalist, and he's actively covered most of the period he wrote about in his book, interviewing many of the artists and attending their performances. The book is long -- almost 500 pages total -- and will probably come as a revelation even to many gay people who lived through those years, let alone the young. I'm ten years older than Walters and began reading the pop/rock press in the late 60s, so I was familiar with most of the music and musicians in the book, though some details were new to me. That won't be true for most of its audience, and none of my criticisms here should dissuade anyone from reading Mighty Real. It's a good read, and you'll almost certainly learn a lot.

What bothered me was the book's overall tone.  Part of this is because of the era: there were almost no openly gay pop musicians in 1969, though some were almost out, such as Little Richard, and a lot of innuendo and code got past industry censors. Broadcast radio was the main outlet for recorded music in those days, and Walters does a good job with this aspect of his subject. Double entendre and innuendo were rampant, not only in radio but in TV and the movies. In addition to that, song lyrics contain a lot of ambiguity by their nature: if the singer addresses "you," the listener can identify himself or herself regardless of the songwriter's intention.  One example out of many Walters gives early on (xiv):

Some songs are unintentionally queer, like the Partridge Family’s 1970 smash “I Think I Love You.” Although it was released on a label run by a gay man, Bell Records’ president Larry Uttal, it launched a fictional family rock group designed for mass consumption via a TV sitcom. That show begat the early ’70s’ defining teen idol, David Cassidy. But once you consider “I Think I Love You” as an LGBTQ song, it’s hard to hear it any other way.... Against all odds, this bubblegum ditty sums up the first step to coming out in an accidental but oddly articulate nutshell, depicting both the angst and the elation of going public with private truths.

I see his point, but I think he has it backwards in a symptomatic way. Fear of rejection, confession of what might be unrequited love for fear of being mocked, the joy of finding out that one's affection is returned after all -- these aren't specifically LGBTQ feelings or experiences. Rather than symptoms of our difference, they're evidence that we're not so different from straight people after all - at least not for these reasons.  I admit that I was in my thirties myself before it dawned on me that when I suffered from failed love, it wasn't because I'm queer (I was actually over that by then) or a neurotic loser, I was participating in the human condition. I've pointed out before that alienation is a majority if not universal experience, especially among adolescents.

I'm not denying that gay kids are still isolated, alienated, or endangered. Of course they are. What I'm saying is that rather than glamorizing those experiences by treating them as inherent to the LGBTQ experience, we should universalize them, and try to find ways to make them less damaging and painful.  This is a theme that runs through Mighty Real, and it bothered me. If you read it, see what you think.

As time went on, some musicians tried to move beyond innuendo and coding to expressing themselves openly. They encountered a great deal of resistance, not just from bigoted fans but from the people who ran the music industry itself and from the music press - and also their own closeted selves. As a result, gay fans worked themselves into ecstasy over every real or imagined dropped hairpin (as queens of my generation called such hints). Walters traces numerous examples of these, acknowledging that the practice is now called "queer-baiting," dangling the possibility that a given star or wannabe might be That Way to excite the fans, then pulling it back. It's hard to say when it's a cynical strategy orchestrated by agents and PR people and when it's really testing the waters by a gay performer, but it becomes less and less tolerable as time goes on.  Walters is too generous to his icons and divas for my liking, tripping lightly over Madonna and Sandra Bernhard gamboling on late-night TV, dropping the name of a lesbian bar they'd gone to without explaining what was really going on.  Maybe he doesn't know; that's the point.

I'm certainly sympathetic to performers who fear hurting their careers by coming out, especially forty and fifty years ago. I'm less sympathetic as Walters's history moves toward the twenty-first century and numerous stars have come out successfully. I also think more credit, indeed celebration, should go to those performers who came out early on, and less to those who went public reluctantly and resentfully, attacking unnamed activists and extremists who supposedly pressured them to stop lying and hiding. There's less opprobrium directed at industry people, from record label bosses (some of them gay) to management and pop critics, who pushed performers to go on lying and hiding.  Ricky Martin said it well when he came out, and uniquely as far as I know:

Many people told me: "Ricky it's not important", "it's not worth it", "all the years you've worked and everything you've built will collapse", "many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature". Because all this advice came from people who I love dearly, I decided to move on with my life not sharing with the world my entire truth. Allowing myself to be seduced by fear and insecurity became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sabotage. Today I take full responsibility for my decisions and my actions.

This was in 2010, outside the official scope of Walters's history, though he jumps ahead from time to time. He doesn't mention Martin.

The most obnoxious example of queer-baiting Walters mentions to my mind, though he doesn't call it that, is Diana Ross's 1980 hit "I'm Coming Out."  I remember the gleeful squees that resounded in my local gay bar when the first time the DJ played it. Walters describes the song's origin:

In recent years, [Nile] Rodgers revealed this indispensable hit’s inspiration. “One particular night I went to a club, the Gilded Grape, and I happened to notice at least six or seven Diana Ross impersonators. So I went outside to call Bernard and said, “You know, Diana Ross is revered by the gay community. If we wrote a song called ‘I’m Coming Out’ for Diana Ross, it would have the same power as James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.''

Wow, really?  I think a more accurate analogy would be if a white singer had recorded "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud."  And it gets worse.

Ross reportedly had no idea she was singing anything queer. To her, “I’m Coming Out” was about busting free from Motown’s formulaic confines. Miss Ross’s concert opener for the next several decades, it features a commanding yet funky horn fanfare befitting a Black queen. The song also functions as a women’s lib anthem. Even its unconventional vocal curves and melodic curls suggest bold yet nuanced feminine assertion. Because Rodgers understood that Ross had always disclosed emotions in her music that LGBTQ people couldn’t speak in the mainstream, he knew the singer could once again be a conduit for her audience’s aspirations. If they couldn’t come out in real life, they could get a taste of that emancipation on the dancefloor. 

Nah, I'm good. I don't think I ever encountered a gay person who believed that Ross was really coming out in that song; they were just excited that she had deigned to recognize their existence. And it turns out that nobody told her she was doing even that. Noblesse oblige has never done much for me. I don't want a taste of emancipation on the dance floor, I want emancipation outside and everywhere. Walters does too, but like many of us he's too grateful for any crumb of affirmation he can get, be it a song the singer doesn't even understand or a male singer's suggestive butt wiggle onstage.

“Dave Gahan has become an accomplished bum wiggler,” Neil Tennant once wrote before he and fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe made a thing out of standing still.

I'm not the only old gay person who misses the anger that drove Gay Liberation in the early 70s and Queer Nation in the 90s.  This weekend I finally got around to reading Armistead Maupin's memoir Logical Family, which among other things is a reminder of how human-hearted that anger can be. Walters pays tribute in Mighty Real to Vito Russo, the activist and chronicler of gay cinema whose righteous anger inspired me in the 70s and after. So Walters wasn't influenced by gay anger; everybody is different. But it's conspicuously absent from Mighty Real, and it bothers me that so many younger gay people are still more excited by straight allies and codes and double entendres than by openness.

What to do, though?  As I've said before, not all gay songs have to wear it on their sleeves.  Not all heterosexual songs do either, and as Walters admits, many song lyrics can be heard or understood as straight or gay.  I've been thinking about this while mulling over this post. The folk revivalists of the 50s and 60s and the old singers they learned from were often cavalier about song lyrics; singing a song from a woman's point of view was no big deal for male singers, and vice versa. Sometimes it mattered, sometimes it didn't.  But when I hear a song I like, such as Joni Mitchell's "Michael from Mountains," I want to sing it myself, and I see no reason why I should change the lyrics to heterosexualize it.  Sometimes, as with Peggy Seeger's "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," changing the narrator's sex would change the meaning of  the song, so I leave it as written.  I soon found out that many gay men really disliked it when I sang songs addressed to men.  I think that's one reason why they made a drag anthem, "I Am What I Am," a hit only when it was recorded by a disco diva; my fellow gay men may enjoy playing with gender in some prescribed ways, but in other ways they're as rigid as many straight men. That's their hangup, and fifty-odd years after Stonewall they can get over themselves.

Now that radio has lost its primacy for promoting pop music, and many musicians are less reliant on major labels to distribute it, there's less reason except maybe habit to keep LGBTQ music closeted. I'm out of touch with the industry, I admit. Maybe Walters or someone else will follow the story past 2000. One thing I find encouraging: musical theater isn't my thing, but YouTube has brought me numerous videos from Broadway fundraisers in which stage performers sing standards with the sexes ... adjusted.  Sometimes they're too campy for my taste, but then the whole genre is campy.  I enjoy them.  There is hope; do this more often, people.

The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.

Bloggiversary

Today is the nineteenth anniversary of this blog. It seems worth noting, even if I haven't been that assiduous lately; many other blogs have not lasted as long.  I have a new draft for something more substantial in the pipeline, however.

If You Come at the King, You'd Best Not Miss

I almost -- that's ALMOST -- felt a little sorry for Donald Trump after he was safely out of office in 2021.  One factor that hurt him seriously was not his doing and out of his control, namely the COVID pandemic.  This time around, he's done the things that have undercut his popularity, and he has no one to blame but himself.  If he hadn't started a war with Iran, his popularity would have sagged anyway, but the spreading effects of that war, from gas prices in particular to inflation in general, have made things worse for him.  Not, you understand, that I care, let alone sympathize; he should be in jail instead of the White House, and every reverse he suffers is fine with me.

I'm not optimistic, though. I think there's a good chance that the Republicans will lose control of Congress in November, and there is backlash evident at all levels of government.  But I don't expect that the Democrats will get the veto-proof supermajority they'd need to impeach and convict him. Even if he were removed from office, JD Vance would take his place, and the Democrats who've collaborated with Trump would be all too happy to work with Vance. Maybe a wave of Democratic insurgents could knock Chuck Schumer out of his leadership position, which could help, but it would depend on who replaced him. It will take an immense effort to undo the damage Trump and his gang have done, and there will be fierce opposition to any such effort from wealthy and powerful people who may not like Trump all that much but are happy to benefit from his policies, and will continue to back them and politicians who support them.  The non-elite people I know and talk to don't know much of what he's done, and aren't any more interested in informing themselves than they ever were. 

Meanwhile, centrist news media are blundering along at their usual level of incompetence, even if you leave aside the overt and explicit moves by far-right billionaires to make them worse. NPR continues to waste time on "what we can expect" and false equivalence.  Today, for example, Morning Edition ran two items on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's mission to meet with Pope Leo. The reporter referred to a "spat" (twice!) between Trump and the Pope, as if it were personal on both sides instead of springing from Trump's usual fury at anyone who criticizes him; they even acknowledged that Popes have objected to wars before in the same terms without setting off an international crisis, if this is one instead of another Trump tantrum.  In the second, they talked to a former US Ambassador to the Holy See, who bloviated without saying anything of substance. That's the kind of commentator NPR likes.  (I'll add some details later, when the transcripts are posted.)

More liberal outlets have exaggerated how much Trump has been affected by the obstacles he has encountered.  Some like to say that he has been "humiliated," which to the extent that it's true means little.  He responds to "humilation" by lashing out, and as long as he's in office he has to power to do more than merely humiliate his enemies.  A popular question in these precincts is whether Trump's MAGA coalition is "starting to crack."  Maybe so, maybe not, but it is still holding together overall.  One or two Congressional Republicans have voted with Democrats against Trump's actions, but they've been balanced by Democrats who voted for Trump.  The resistance by some Indiana State senators to Trump's call for redistricting was brave and noble, but most of those Republicans were successfully primaried by MAGA agents this week.  So far the coalition is intact, and while Trump is behaving ridiculously in every public statement he makes, he hasn't suffered any real consequences yet.  Get back to me when that changes.

Let Your Yes Be Yes, and Your No Be No

Just a brief addition to yesterday's post.  On Sunday, Doonesbury's "Say What?" department posted this nugget from Sean Hannity:

This was supposed to be an outrageous idea.  My "say what?" reaction wss "Wait, doesn't the Pope get questioned?" I don't follow Vatican news, but what I remember are a lot of stories where Pope Francis had told reporters something that was taken to be highly liberal and inclusive, like pets going to Heaven, or that homosexuals have a right to be part of the family, or that in some lost video interview he'd endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. In that last case it turned out that before he became Pope he offered to accept such unions in Argentina as a bargaining chip to stave off legal same-sex marriage. He failed to do so, but his fans (even non-Catholics) were ready to celebrate him as an ally anyway.  When he said we have a right to be part of the family, he immediately added "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least."

As I wrote on this topic before, "many people scour Francis's statements for what they 'hint' or may  'imply' or 'suggest,' as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them."

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Pope, like any other head of state, should have to face hard questions. While Hannity is technically correct that Donald Trump "takes questions all the time," Trump doesn't usually answer them: he lies, distracts, wanders off the subject, blusters; and if a reporter presses him, he turns nasty.  But then, the media don't know how to ask intelligent hard questions, and I don't believe Hannity would be any different.  Even secular US reporters would be too busy bowing and scraping and calling him "Your Holiness" to do their job properly. (I just thought of the time some US gay male activists were permitted to ask the Dalai Lama to clarify his position on homosexuality.  They were all Buddhists, if memory serves, and too thrilled at being in the Presence to push very hard; the DL was also less than forthcoming, and of course there was also the language barrier.  Yet the DL is much less pompous than most high-level holy men.  I should do a post on that encounter soon.)

I don't know, maybe Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is a Catholic too. But the reaction to Hannity's suggestion was just another example of the weird authoritarianism that's common among American liberals, the idea that commoners shouldn't get above ourselves when we're allowed to be in the same space as royalty.

The title of this post comes from Matthew 5:37, which I think is good advice, even though Jesus himself liked to dodge hard questions like "What is your authority to say these things?" or "Should we pay tribute to Caesar?" Pope Leo likes to quote the Bible at times, but he also gets rather woolly at others. But it would be rude to quote Matthew 5:37 to him - who do I think I am, anyway?