I admit, I have not said nice things about the new pope. I still say that his much quoted “who am I to judge” said a lot less than people infer. And I still think he could, without radically upsetting decades of doctrine, have gone one step further in that regard. However, I have to admit that I’m starting to like this guy.

Now, why should anyone care what this liberal gay taoist thinks about the pope? Well, one can turn the question around this way, why do news anchors, pundits, and lawmakers keep turning to catholic bishops and cardinals (sometimes the same archbishops, bishops, of cardinals who have shielded pedophile priests from cops or shielded financial assets from lawsuits by the victims of priest sex abuse) for guidance on gay rights? If these guys keep forcing their views into the laws that cover all us non-Catholics, then we have a right to at least make our views about them known.

In the last few months Pope Francis has managed to anger and confuse a lot of people with his audacious claims that when Jesus said his followers should feed the hungry or that it would be better for his rich followers to sell everything they owned and give it to the poor, that Jesus actually meant it. Sarah Palin accused the pope of being influenced by liberal media. Rush Limbaugh accused the pope of being marxist.

And the more he irritates those sorts of people, the more I find myself liking him.

He’s taken another interesting step recently, of not re-appointing some of the hard right “culture warriors” to a committee that picks new people to appoint as bishops. He has instead appointed a couple of cardinals who aren’t exactly liberal, but one of whom is famous for arguing that it is wrong for priests to withhold communion for political activities, and saying the married same-sex couples should still be welcome in the church.

John Stewart at the Daily Show did a nice job connecting the dots on this, showing how the Pope is now a four-star general leading the charge on the War on Christmas.

I’m glad that this shepherd seems to be turning his attention to watching his flock, and perhaps attempting to get them to spend less time interfering in my life. Now, I’m not terribly happy that the oldest Gay news magazine in North America, The Advocate, named the pope their person of the year. I thought Time had gone a little over the top doing so, and was a bit disappointed that they didn’t choose someone like Edie Windsor. But I think it is unforgivable for the Advocate to pass those actual gay pioneers for someone who still says that homosexuals “are fundamentally disordered.”

On the other hand, it could be worse. They could have named Ken Hutcherson. Hutcherson was, until his death yesterday, the senior pastor at a fundamentalist church just across the lake from Seattle. He’s somewhat infamous for such things as a boycott of Microsoft that had no effect on the company’s support for gay rights laws in our state, but that Hutcherson still claimed as a victory for reasons no one can fathom. Then there are the countless times he’s said that god hates effeminate men, once threatening to tear a gay man’s arm off and beating him to death with it (he later said that he was just joking). Or his many campaigns against local schools, such as trying to get teachers fired because they coordinated memorials for a gay student who had been murdered, and the many times he and his bodyguards disrupted a public school near his church because it had instituted an anti-bullying program that included protections for gay and lesbian students. He compared the governor of our state to the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln because she signed the marriage equality law.

But one of his worse offenses was allowing himself to be used by white social conservatives as “proof” that the fight for gay rights wasn’t really a civil rights issue. If an African-American preacher who had experienced “true” discrimination in his youth hates the gays, “obviously” that means being anti-gay isn’t really bigotry. Many of those social conservatives he allied himself with support racially discriminatory policies today, and some of them fought the civil rights movement back in the sixties and seventies.

But he joined right in with them.

I know I’m a terrible person to dredge up a subset of his many acts of hatred and bigotry just a day after his death. I feel sorry for his family, I know that they loved him and have experienced a great loss with his death. But I can’t help but be delighted on behalf of all the people, especially gay and other non-conforming kids in schools, who he has reviled and persecuted for years.

Gay activist and sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, is more magnanimous than I am. He posted:

“Sad to hear that Ken Hutcherson has died — sympathy to his family. I want the enemies of LGBT equality to live long enough to come around.”

I want enemies of equality to come around, yes. But some people are so far gone down the road of hatred, they spend so much time and energy making life miserable for innocent people, that we stop hoping for them to come around, and just start waiting for them to die.