Did the Pope bless Kim Davis’ beliefs? About as much as Mark McGwire bat!

Talk about some serious media mismanagement; how else to explain the fact that the Vatican is feeling compelled to come up with clarification after clarification about the “meeting” the Pope supposedly had with that county clerk from Kentucky who wants to be the heroine of the homophobic community.

Did it really happen?

For it seems that back when Pope Francis was in the United States last week, Kim Davis was one of a dozen people who were taken to the Vatican’s embassy in Washington.

SHE GOT A brief bit of face time, where Davis insists she was told by His Holiness himself that he told her to “stay strong” in her ongoing fight against people who expect her to fulfill her legal duties as clerk of Rowan County, Ky., by signing off on all marriage licenses.

Even those issued by gay couples wishing to have legal legitimacy added to their personal relationships.

Most of what has been spoken about this “meeting” has come from Davis. The woman who isn’t even Catholic (she’s part of an Apostolic faith) wants us to think she has the backing of one of the world’s leading religious faiths.

The Vatican, which likes to think it is above all these worldly considerations, initially came up with a “we can neither confirm nor deny” strategy in response to Davis and her followers’ antics.

IT LATER BECAME a “we confirm they met, but will not elaborate” type of response.
 

No longer the highlight of the papal visit

But even that was not enough to put to rest this issue. By Friday, a Vatican spokesman had to issue yet another clarification – providing scant details about an issue upon which the church usually thinks are no one else’s concern.

“The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” we were told. Then, we learned how the pope also greeted a gay couple and their friends during his tour -- the same amount of attention that Davis got.

Not that I expect this to put the issue to rest – there are those who are going to keep this issue alive for as long as possible. It may well be that it was people within the Catholic church hierarchy who arranged for Davis to even be on hand to see the Pope in Washington – perhaps those who want to push the church toward the ideologue side with regards to the gay marriage debate.

JUST BECAUSE THE courts may have ruled a certain way doesn’t mean there won’t be those wishing to overturn them. Abortion was decided by the courts to be a legitimate medical procedure more than four decades ago – yet the issue isn’t anywhere near going away.



A comparable moment to Kim Davis?

Now I’m not about to claim Davis is flat-out lying when she talks about her papal moment. Only that I realize being allowed into the pope’s presence shouldn’t be thought of as being a bigger deal than it really is.

I still remember in 1999 when Pope John Paul II came to St. Louis. One of the people he met with was then-St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire. They shook hands, and McGwire got to introduce his son, Matt, to the pope.

The whole incident lasted a few seconds before the pope moved on. Aside from creating the opportunity for some jokes about the pope meeting with a cardinal, it was just a brief tidbit.

YET IN A papal journey to the Americas that ventured into Havana and saw Pope Francis speak both at Madison Square Garden AND before Congress, there’s a very good chance that this trip will have as its lingering memory the few seconds that Davis worked her way to the front of the line and had papal face time. Then again, the pope’s visit also got upstaged by the death of one-time New York Yankees great Yogi Berra, so maybe the pope was going to struggle for top-billing.

His death put Pope on Pg. 14 of NY Post

By that definition of papal attention, perhaps I should consider my own ’99 moment – I was a United Press International reporter back then and I was in St. Louis for the John Paul II trip. At one point, I was watching a motorcade through the city and the pope was about 50 feet away from me when he looked in my direction and waved.

For his later mass at the now-former TWA Dome, I was relegated to another room and had to watch him speak via a video screen connection. Admittedly, Davis’ proximity to a Pope was better than I had.

But somehow, I think her experience was closer to mine than to a true papal audience – which is the impression some conservative ideologues seem to want to create. Which strikes me as a repulsive use of religion for one’s own beliefs!

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It ain’t over ‘til it’s over

If he hadn’t been a guru, of sorts, to the New York baseball scene, Yogi Berra could have had a career as a political observer to our local officials – perhaps the guy whispering his words of wisdom into their ears.

The Tao of Yogi?

Because that particular Berra-ism about declaring victory too soon is one that perhaps the people trying to lead a movement to change the way we draw our political boundaries should have learned a long time ago.

I STILL REMEMBER reading the reports about how the movement (calling itself Yes for Independent Maps) was crowing a month ago when they submitted nominating petitions that demand the issue be put on the ballots for the Nov. 4 elections in the form of a referendum question.

Let the people decide. “Yes,” or “no.” They had 532,264 signatures of support that they filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections

That is well in excess of the minimum number of signatures needed in order to actually get an initiative on the ballot across the state. They won. They declared victory. They made smug statements about how this, alone, showed the moral high-ground and desirability of their cause.

There was no way they could be stopped now!!!

READING THOSE ACCOUNTS, I recalled thinking they were premature in declaring victory. Way too cocky, as a matter of fact. Somebody was going to wind up eating some serious crow.

Which is what seems to be happening now.

Reports this week indicate that the State Board of Elections is finding that the 532,264 signature figure is off, way off.

Yogi 'plays' better on TV than most pols

For one thing, the elections board says it counted all the signatures, and only came up with 507,467. Which is still well ahead of the 298,400 valid signatures required this year (it’s based on voter turnout in recent election cycles, so it changes) to succeed.

BUT …

The state Elections Board handles the process by doing a thorough review of a randomly-selected share of petitions.

Petitions containing 25,375 signatures were scrutinized – and 11,568 signatures were found to be legitimate. That’s less than half!

At this rate, the petition drive is going to turn out to have produced a lot of junk (that’s a lot of times that “Mickey Mouse” signed his name to these documents). May 31 isn’t only the deadline for the General Assembly to conduct its business. The end of the month (actually, May 30, the last business date, since May 31 is a Saturday) is when the process must be completed.

SO UNLESS SOMETHING shifts dramatically in the next week or so, this is going to wind up being a failed effort.

Like many pols, son followed him into family 'business'

Admittedly, the Yes for Independent Maps group is trying to fight back, although their route seems to be one more of whining about the review process being “hasty,” and the Chicago Tribune reporting about “personal advances” made by state Elections board officials to the group’s official watchers.

It sounds like this could be a cause that falls by the wayside. Which doesn’t surprise me because the whole process of nominating petitions is such a subjective one. There is so much leeway by officials to declare what is, and isn’t, valid.

Nobody should presume this is over until they actually walk into their polling place and see the question printed on their ballots.

IT MAY COME across that I’m enjoying this lesson in political reality being taught to the Yes for Independent Maps group – which at times behaves in ways that make it seem more like a cause funded by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner so he can have something to talk about, rather than an actual concern for the issue.

Yogi comes equipped w/ his own 'yes' men

It’s actually funded in part by Chicago Cubs part-owner Tom Ricketts (he gave $50,000 back in March). Which makes me wonder why he’s not focusing more on his ball club.

Perhaps Yogi could come to Chicago and give the Wrigley Field set some advice on what constitutes a real winning ball club (he would know, 14 World Series appearances, with 10 of them on the victorious side).

Although reading through the various lists of Yogi-isms, I came across another one that I suspect many of our local political people would find applicable – “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”

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