Left-wing actor Sean Penn declared Friday that the Pope should “impeach” evangelical leaders who fail to denounce former President Donald Trump, botching the basics of Christian beliefs in the process.
“Evangelical leaders should themselves be impeached by the Vatican if they themselves don’t follow Nikki Haley’s lead & clearly state they should not have followed Satin [sic] into the bowels of hell. But, perhaps they are too busy at sex parties,” Penn posted on social media.
Unfortunately for Penn, the Pope has no authority over leaders of Protestant denominations. The Vatican does not appoint or remove leaders outside of the Roman Catholic church.
Penn was reacting to former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who once served as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, telling Politico that Trump is guilty of inciting riots and insisting that Republicans “should not have followed him.”
“I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture. I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far,” Haley told Politico. “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him.”
Penn is not as active on social media as other left-wing celebrities — think Rob Reiner or Alyssa Milano — but when he does write political hot takes, they’re often quite bonkers. This January, he smeared Trump supporters as terrorists, compared them to al-Qaeda, and said the then-president was just like Osama Bin Laden. Days before that, he advised Trump to take cyanide as “a mercy for man & country.”
Penn’s antics extend beyond social media, too. In 2018, he published a novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, with an obvious self-insert protagonist who fantasizes about assassinating a Trump-esque president.
On Feb. 4, the activist actor reportedly attacked his own charity after two workers complained about the long hours and lack of benefits they have been subjected to while working to vaccinate people in California.
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