The pope made news again, saying that in light of the Orlando shooting, the Catholic Church owes queers an apology: Pope: Church owes apology to gays (and they’re not the only ones). The news came while I was in the middle of a busy weekend including both the Locus Awards and the Pride Parade, so I didn’t have time to dig into it. I assumed that this was another instance of the press taking part of a statement out of context, as they did three years ago with all the “who am I to judge” headlines that said the pope was in favor of gay rights, when what the pope actually said was more along the lines of, “Who am I to judge a person who claims to be ex-gay and does a decent enough job of staying in the closet as to give me plausible deniability?”

I figured that I would look into the story later, fully expecting to find out that the statement he’d made was more complicated than the headlines make it. Well, it is, but the contradiction isn’t as blatantly obvious as that previous time. “I think that the Church not only should apologize to the person who is gay whom it has offended. … But we must also apologize to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children exploited for labor. It must apologize for having blessed so many weapons.”

There are several qualifiers in there, and I could quibble over a lot of them, but the real hypocrisy is a bit more meta. He thinks that the Church should apologize. Really? I wonder if he has thought of mentioning it to the person who is in charge of the Church; you know, the person who has the power to actually apologize. And more than apologize, the person who, in theory, has the power to make infallible statements that come with the stamp of approval of god?

Has the pope actually told the pope what he thinks?

The other contradiction is a little less funny. The statement, and his following comments, make it clear that he is referring to the church apologizing for things that it had done in the past, as if its teachings are not still, present tense, causing harm to queers, and women, and so on. Biblically, you don’t ask for forgiveness until after you have stopped committing the sin. The church (both the Catholic Church and a whole lot of people claiming to speak for god in other denominations) is still bearing false witness against queer people, still describing us as sinful and disordered, and so on.

You have to rescind those lies, aspersions, and condemnations before you apologize for them.

There’s a new study out showing, once again, that simply saying these things about us causes actual harm to our health, both mental and physical: What Happens When Gay People Are Told That Homosexuality Is A Sin?

And I want to make something very clear, here. Theologically, a sin is an intentional and voluntary action. All of the medical science (yes, all of it) agrees that homosexuality is not a matter of choice, it is an innate characteristic. In other words, it isn’t voluntary. When a sincerely held religious belief is contradicted by scientific fact, then it isn’t faith, it is delusion.

When any religious leader insists that homosexuality is a sin, they are bearing false witness. The Bible also insists that slavery is a good thing, yet no Christian religious leaders (not even Pope Emeritus Benedict) are calling for a return to slavery. They now all handwave it and say that the slavery comments in the Bible are because of the culture at the time, and therefore aren’t a commentary applicable today. Or they try to claim that the Bible’s comments on slavery are really about god advising people how to deal with a situation that shouldn’t exist but that cannot, at present, be rectified. They insist on that rationalization even though the Apostle Paul wrote one entire book of the Bible about how a Christian slave owner should treat his Christian slaves (spoiler: at no point did he say that people should never treat other people as property).

The sections of the Bible that are usually read to condemn homosexuality are a lot less clear than its teachings on slavery. Yet members of the religious right are willing to contort themselves to claim that the Bible’s clear endorsement of slavery doesn’t exist, while pretending that these few mostly ambiguous comments on fidelity, temple prostitutes, and so on are indisputable statements about people who love other people of the same gender.

And every time this pope has said some things that the press latched onto to wildly report that the Church was softening it’s stand on queers, later statements and officially issued proclamations re-iterate the original position that we are disordered, sinful, dangerous, et cetera. So, no, I’m not awaiting whatever comes of this comment about apologies with bated breath.