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" Give the Clan of the Red Beanie credit. For five years, after their international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice was revealed, you couldn&amp;#039;t get most members of the Clan to talk even with a grand jury. And now, with their quivering terror of uncontrolled ladyparts legitimized in an actual presidential campaign, you can&amp;#039;t get most of them to shut up. Witness our latest contestant on Who Wants To Be A Borgia?: Cardinal Raymond Burke. Cardinal Burke used to run the Archdiocese of St. Louis and now is a fulltime clerical layabout at the Vatican, where he presides over the Vatican&amp;#039;s highest court. (What&amp;#039;s that you say? Jesus never established a court in the Gospels and, in fact, didn&amp;#039;t do so well in his one and only encounter with religious courts? Shut up, ya heathen omadhaun.) Let us establish at the outset that the good cardinal is either a liar or a paranoid, or he&amp;#039;s willing to lie to paranoids in order to maintain the temporal bureaucracy in which he serves.... Cardinal Raymond Burke, former Archbishop of St. Louis and now the head of the Vatican&amp;#039;s highest court, (said) that he could envision a time when the Catholic Church in the U.S., &amp;quot;even by announcing her own teaching,&amp;quot; is accused of &amp;quot;engaging in illegal activity, for instance, in its teaching on human sexuality.&amp;quot; Asked if the cardinal could even see American Catholics being arrested for their faith he replied, &amp;quot;I can see it happening, yes.&amp;quot; I can see Sofia Vergara waiting for me out by the garden gnomes, but if I tell a cop I see her, they&amp;#039;ll lock me up. Anyway, Cardinal Burke is unlimbering himself again about ladyparts and what they&amp;#039;re really for, and he&amp;#039;s meddling in the secular government while doing so, and he&amp;#039;s managing to do all of that under a withering corss-examination by a house journalist. Thomas McKenna: &amp;quot;It is beautiful to see how the faithful have rallied behind the Hierarchy....How does your Eminence comment on the union of solidarity of our bishops?&amp;quot;  Yes, if the faithful rallied any more enthusiastically behind the hierarchy on this issue, we&amp;#039;d all be Methodists. Jesus. McKenna, have some pride, will you? Anyway, the cardinal managed to gather himself sufficiently under this unremitting assault to answer: &amp;quot;Yes, I have received emails and other communications from lay faithful who say that they are supporting their bishops 100% and they have communicated to their bishops their gratitude and assured them that they want them to continue to be courageous and not to be deceived by any kind of false accommodations which in fact continue this same kind of agenda which sadly we have witnessed for too long in our country which is totally secular and therefore is anti-life and anti-family.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m sure you have. The rest of us \u2014 or what we like to call The Overwhelming Fking Majority \u2014 stopped paying attention to you and your kind on this issue in 1965, whe Holy Mother Church went over the cliff on it. Sleuthdog McKenna&amp;#039;s not through, though: Thomas McKenna: &amp;quot;So a Catholic employer, really getting down to it, he does not, or she does not provide this because that way they would be, in a sense, cooperating with the sin...the sin of contraception or the sin of providing a contraceptive that would abort a child, is this correct?&amp;quot; Cardinal Burke: &amp;quot;This is correct. It is not only a matter of what we call &amp;quot;material cooperation&amp;quot; in the sense that the employer by giving this insurance benefit is materially providing for the contraception but it is also &amp;quot;formal cooperation&amp;quot; because he is knowingly and deliberately doing this, making this available to people. There is no way to justify it. It is simply wrong.&amp;quot; So, if you&amp;#039;re keeping score at home, employers who provide contraception without co-pays are sinners, as are the people who run the insurance companies who provide the insurance that provides the contraception without the co-pays. To hell with Vatican II, is Cardinal Burke aware that we&amp;#039;ve had a Reformation? This issue is not going away. The Clan&amp;#039;s decided this is the way for it to reassert its secular power, and a way for thm to get in on all that political power enjoyed by wingnut American Protestantism. Sooner or later in the campaign, the president&amp;#039;s going to have to tell these guys to get lost. And, I know it&amp;#039;s not even really fair at this point, but, yes, Cardinal Burke is a reactionary kind of goober \u2014 leave my pal Rick Majerus alone! \u2014 whose record on the subject of clerical sexual abuse can best be described as &amp;quot;not altogether godawful.&amp;quot; He also apparently takes the whole notion of his &amp;quot;sheep&amp;quot; as being something more than biblically metaphorical. (H/T to Steve M.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13580/st-louis-cardinal-sex-8011887/>