"The Speck" and the Pope are out in right field

Mitt "The Speck" Romney (he considers himself a "red speck in a blue state") proposed an utterly repulsive, wholly unethical and entirely illegal idea to the Heritage Foundation: wiretapping mosques. He said, ''Prevention begins with intelligence . . . How about people in settings, mosques for instance, that maybe are teaching doctrines of hate, are we monitoring that, wiretapping . . . ?"

It occurs to me this may be a calculated move to get the media to portray him as completely looney-tunes, which seems to be considered an important credential on the far right. You don't want to overdo it like Pat Robertson, but if you can get to a level of say Ashcroft or Bolton crazy, you improve your chances of an executive appointment.

The Pope is another matter. News reports say he's about to call for banning gay priests. Hello? Anybody home? Just on practical grounds it's a bad idea. There's already a priest shortage, and now he wants to add another group to the exclusion list. One not as large as "all women", but a traditionally strong pool for the priesthood.

Don't priests take a vow of celibacy anyway? If celibacy is the issue that's one thing--priests of any orientation make the same vow. But if it's a matter of personal identity and sexual orientation, this is a big stepp backward for an organization that is already stumbling. The message seems to be that God made a mistake when he created gay people (as he did when he created women, apparently). This institution that sought to strip all spiritual vitality out of my being over the first 18 years of my life continues to show me I was right to leave.

Let's ban lefthanded people while we're at it. God screwed up making them too. To the stake with them all!