[+/-] Anti-humanist news roundup

Conservative/Catholic/Wingnut Andrew Sullivan has a few words on the new Pope, and actually makes sense today:

And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church....

[W]hat is the creed of the Church? That is for the Grand Inquisitor to decide. Everything else - especially faithful attempts to question and understand the faith itself - is "human trickery." It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It's not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It's a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning.

A former trainee priest who has accused the founder of an influential Catholic order of sexual abuse said today that new Pope Palpatine I deliberately shelved a probe into his claims for six years.

With a pedophelia epidemic running rampant among heterosexual males and Catholic priests, the question on everyone's mind, of course, is, "What Would a Texan Do?" The answer: approve legislation that would prohibit homosexuals and bisexuals from becoming foster parents. Nice job, asshats. Exclude people who could be good foster parents to thousands of children who need them.

Speaking of Texans, you know what hemorrhoids and cowboy hats have in common? Sooner or later, every asshole has one.

Speaking of assholes, Herr Gropenfuhrer says America should "close the borders in California and all across Mexico and in the United States." Gropenfuhrer, you should recall, emigrated from Austria as a young man.

The American Taliban are everywhere. The NYT reports that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive at the Air Force Academy. There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.