American Idol

I'm asking, I'm genuinely asking how a group of people whose only personality traits are loving Trump and how Jesus-y they are, don't see the problem.

Pictured: that time Republicans literally made
a golden idol out of Tump and worshiped it.

I know I bring this up a lot. I just like
to imagine the non-trashfirew timeline we
could have been living in all these years.

Why am I asking, you may ask? Because we're like a week in from the Right Reverend Mariann Budde's sermon and she still hasn't offered the apology so petulantly demanded by the narrowly elected former President now felon who is now once again President. Somehow. Because--I don't even know--my point is he's still a felon and Hillary Clinton got more votes than him in 2016 than he did this time and--sorry, the thing about the last eight years or so of living with this gasbag in our lives, is an increased tendency to spin out.

Above: Rev. Budde seen here doing her
damn job without whining to the press
about how everyone is mean to her.

Where was I? Oh, right. Reverend Budde (sounds like buddy, by the way), if you haven't heard, came to prominence again (we'll get to that in a second) durning her sermon the day after the inauguration when she asked the President "In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon people who are scared now." They are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in both Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives." And ok, sounds pretty on brand for the religion. 

This is either really bad casting or
Hans Holbein was terrible at his job.

Specifically Episcopal. The Church refers to itself as "Protestant, yet Catholic" and Robin Williams once called it Catholic Light, but it's basically an offshoot of the the Church of England. For some context, you remember The Tutors starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers preposterously cast as King Henry VIII? The Church of England as it is today was formed when history's fattest, gingerest king threw off the authority of the Pope and declared himself the head of the Church before going on to murder a couple of his wives. 

"Dat-da-da-da-da-ya-da."

-George III, former 

Pope of America

Welp, fast forward another two hundred and fifty years or so, when we threw off the authority of the porphyria addled King George III, and decided it would be kind of weird to become a republic while keeping the king as some kind of a pope in a powdered wig, and so the Episcopal Church was born. Which, by all rights these MAGA goons, if they were serious about being both patriotic and Christians, should be all about. It's the don't tread on me flag of origin stories. 

"You know I railed against the rich and
told everyone to love one another, right?"

-Jesus, kind of over the MAGA goons

They keep some of the trappings of Catholicism: the singing, the robes, the architecture. But they're a bit more live and let live when it comes to things like transubstantiation and biblical literalism. Also, they were early to the party on supporting the civil rights movement, accepting women as clergy, gays as clergy, performing same-sex weddings. If you're going to pick a religion, you could do far worse. Like, say, whatever so much of the vaguely-defined, self-proclaimed conservative Right is. The ones losing their minds right now over Budde's sermon, and shrieking about how she politicized it.

Which, she didn't. Of course she didn't. But the felon who failed to put his hand on the Bible during the swearing in, and who told a crowd of MAGAs (who evidently weren't listening to anything he said) how he himself isn't a Christian, is just performing piety for white nationalists and playing the victim. Both things that look even worse and less convincing on him than they did during his first, disastrous administration. 

I guess what I'm saying is he shouldn't hold his breath for that apology.