Tim Brough's Black Leather Bookshelf

VIRGINIA BEACH (The Borowitz Report) – Evangelist Pat Robertson sparked controversy in today’s broadcast of his 700 Club program by saying that yesterday’s mild East Coast earthquake was God’s revenge on people “who act kind of gay. All across the Eastern seaboard, there are men who get manicures, wear designer eyewear and know about thread counts,” claims Rev. Robertson. “God finds this somewhat gay-like behavior confusing, and He responded by getting mildly peeved.”

The televangelist warned that if Americans persist in their “seemingly sort-of-gay behavior,” the country should brace itself for additional ambiguous acts of retaliation from the Almighty. “God will strike back at people who act sort of gay with all kinds of mild responses,” he said. “If you keep getting pedicures and facials, you can expect two to three inches of rain and some really hot humid days in your future.”

Rev. Robertson said that New Yorkers who reacted in an over-the-top way to yesterday’s temblor “run the risk of moderately annoying the Heavenly Father yet again.”

“God looks at people who get their panties in a twist after a little shaking, and He says to Himself, ‘Wow, that’s really kind of gay,’” he said.

Pulled fromphilbutrin

Deliver Us From Weasels
4 out of 5 Stars

Director Amy Berg and Father Thomas Doyle deserve a lot of credit for their bravery. Even braver are the victims in this harrowing documentary of child abuse and rape by a California Catholic Priest and the ongoing cover-up. From the seventies and into the nineties, Father Oliver O'Grady was sexually molesting children of both sexes, including the rape of a nine month old infant. But each of the numerous times he was caught, his superiors would deny there was any problem, then promise the problem would be taken care of, then whisk O'Grady off to another location where the cycle would start over.

The difference between this and many of the other abuse scandals to strike the Catholic Church is that O'Grady genially admits he is a pedophile, forcing those in charge of the clean-up detail to whitewash the aftermath of the stated facts. Father Doyle is seemingly the only one in the hierarchy to exhibit any common sense in the matter, and his grilling of Bishop Roger Mahoney (now the Cardinal of Los Angeles) paints an evil picture of a man willing to throw his Christians to the Lions if they came in-between him and his ambitions to higher office. His frigid denials are enough to turn your stomach. Mahoney refuses, over and over, to acknowledge that O'Gardy's actions were criminal or even merited disciplinary action, even denying he recalls any problems with molestations at one point (by claiming it would be the obligation of the church's attorneys).

The pattern is maddening. O'Grady takes a Church, destroys lives, gets caught, gets a promotion to another location. When he finally gets into a scandal he can't wriggle out of, the church buys his silence with an annuity fund. After serving seven years, O'Grady is deported to Ireland, where his sex crimes are unknown and he is free to live out his life as he chooses. Basically, O'Grady is walking free among families (when the film catches up with him, he is living with a family and their children, they have no idea he's a convicted child molester) with the full blessing of the Church and on the Vatican's payroll.

In O'Grady's aftermath, you see a victim's father angry denounce God and religion as fake, a Pope granted immunity from prosecution from President Bush as the scandal creeps towards the top, and - again - O'Grady walking the streets of Ireland. In an interesting side note, the prosecutorial immunity that Bush gave Pope Hitler Youth Ratzinger from the scandal may not protect the Pope from the Irish abuse scandal that now swarms around Cardinal Sean Brady's repeated covering up of abuses. Or maybe, like the despicable laissez faire attitude the Vatican took over Boston's Cardinal Law, they'll just fly Brady in to head a basilica in Rome. As "Deliver Us From Evil" shows, it would just fit the pattern.