Madison prelate Bob Morlino (or “Pasta Bob” as we like to call him) picked up the Congress of Racial Equality’s Lifetime Achievement Award “for resisting groups seeking to deprive him of his fundamental right – as an American and as a Catholic leader – to express support for a state constitutional amendment to protect marriage as a man and a woman.” The award is just a symbol of Morlino’s resolution to serve the oligarchy of his faith at their intersection with the secular oligarchy of wealth and power. By “otherizing” gays Morlino drives a wedge between decent people in two oppressed groups. This makes him just another one of Karl Rove’s flying monkeys, and I say this not as a member of a “group seeking to deprive him” of anything, but rather as an individual who is sick to death of fat priests feeding off the people. Regardless of black and white denial, gay-lesbian-bisexual-and-transgendered people have also gotten the shitty end of the stick from the predominantly white power elite. Disapproval of non-heterosexual love knows no racial boundary, and encouraging homophobia is a wedge issue that continues to rend the fabric of the progressive movement. Morlino knows this.
There was a time not long ago when the Catholic church did better serving the poor, the needy, the oppressed. But today liberation theology is dead. Just as Dietrich Bonhoefer died in the 1940′s in order that weak willed cowards and closet fascists could survive, so Oscar Romero died in our time. Ratzinger survived. Bonhoefer died. Morlino lives. Romero is dead. Morlino serves Ratzinger and Rove. He sits on the board of visitors of the School of the Americas, the US School for Assassins that trained the murderers of Oscar Romero.
There is no irony in play here, rather cold calculation and manipulation. This is a demonstration of the shepherds pulling the wool over the eyes of the sheep.