Neil Steinberg, a columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times, is out with a must-read response to Pope Francis's shockingly illiberal, violence-rationalizing, and tone-deaf comments on the Charlie Hebdo massacre:

What we are seeing here is a clash between two systems. Not East and West, not Islam and Christianity. It is between the ancient tribal notion that your faith, whatever it is, is the One True Way and anybody else is blaspheming in error, at best to be tolerated and converted through suasion, at worst to be destroyed. That philosophy gripped the globe from the dawn of time until, well, now, though it has weakened in places by the very modern idea that the world is made up of many equally valid—or invalid—approaches to sanctity and God, and that which one a person follows is up to the dictates of that person's heart.


Tolerance doesn't mean everyone coos sympathetically at every conceivable moral system. Tolerance means you don't demand that others ape your deeds, words or thoughts. You can believe something without imposing it on others. If you've ever been in a synagogue, you may have noticed something missing. No stained glass portraits, no statues of God with a big beard. Like Muslims, we believe it is wrong to depict God—we aren't even supposed to say His actual name.
 In our view, every New Yorker cartoon of God on His throne is blasphemy. But we don't shoot up the New Yorker. We subscribe instead. Jews don't go around slapping cheeseburgers out of people's hands.


Paddle your own canoe. Practice your own beliefs. Put the passion that you apply to forcing others to do things they don't believe into doing the good that your supposedly superior faith system supposedly represents. Why isn't the pope teaching that?

Neil Steinberg is amazing—go read his entire column on Francis and Charlie Hebdo, follow Neil on Twitter, lurk on his blog Every Goddamn Day.

In other Pope Francis news: This week, the pope said that Catholics shouldn't "breed like rabbits" (not anymore!), which is a new, different, and progressive thing for a pope to say. But Pope Francis also said that civil marriage rights for same-sex couples amounts to the "ideological colonization of the family" (because gay people don't come from families) and that gay people are "trying to destroy the family" (not form our own), which is an old, tired, and reactionary thing for a pope to say.

Makes you wonder which pope will show up to speak before a joint session of Congress—Francis is the first pope ever to be invited to speak before a joint session of Congress—later this year: the new, different, and progressive pope who demands action on climate change (pissing off conservatives) or the old, tired, and reactionary pope who spews bile at gays and lesbians (pissing off gay advice columnists). We'll just have to wait and see.