First, the Pope kept his meeting with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis a secret. Davis, of course, refused to license same-sex marriages, stating that it conflicted with her religious viewpoint; for that refusal, she was briefly jailed for contempt of court.
Now, the Vatican has told the media that his meeting with Davis didn’t act as an endorsement. Davis reportedly visited at the invitation of the Vatican ambassador, but spokesman Federico Lombardi explained, “The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.” Lombardi said the Vatican felt the need to “clarify” what had happened.
CBS reports simultaneously that its Vatican source told them that the Pope had been “exploited” in a “meeting that never should have taken place.” Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich said, “Meeting with someone is not an endorsement of that person’s position.”
If the Pope cannot endorse a Christian refusing to violate her Biblical beliefs in the name of the great god-government, what can he endorse? And why did the Pope feel the desperate desire to disassociate from Kim Davis, but not make the same statement about President Obama, whom he stood beside while the president lied about his allegiance to religious freedom?
Obviously, the Pope desires the continuous favor of the leftist media and considers his own leftist priorities – government-caused income redistribution, radical environmentalism, pacifism – higher priorities than standing up for practice of religion in daily life. Why else would the Pope refuse to mention abortion before Congress but speak at length about the death penalty, lecture Americans about illegal immigration but not same-sex marriage, heavily publicize his visit to a prison but not the Little Sisters of the Poor, and tell the world that the environment has rights but religious clerks do not?
The Pope stands with the left. This latest slap in the face to religious conservatives in America, both Catholic and non-Catholic, demonstrates that proposition in spades.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.