Last month, a Houston police officer shot and killed a mentally ill wheelchair-bound double amputee after the man brandished a pen.   While no images of the incident are available, one can merely review the first presidential debate to get a sense of the lopsided nature of the slaughter.  Bordering on a sacrificial offering, apologists offered myriad excuses for Mr. Obama’s gelded performance – his arrogance, his wedding anniversary, Denver’s altitude – though, to me he looked remarkably like that girl my roommate Todd roofied in Vegas during Spring Break.  But don’t worry about Kimberly, or whatever her name was, because according to Rep. Todd Aiken (R-MO), an unwanted pregnancy would be “really rare.”  “If it’s a legitimate rape,” Aiken expounded, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”  Trust me, this rape was nothing if not legitimate, but still, even given the way off chance that any fertilized ova eschewed Mitt Romney’s offer of self-deportation and fugitively burrowed into Kimberly’s decidualized uterine wall, there remains a silver lining.  And I don’t mean the drug’s amnesiac effects.  According to Indiana Republican senatorial candidate Richard Murdock, having sex against your will is a blessing: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, it is something that God intended to happen.”  So, please, don’t regard Todd as a sexual predator, rather think of him as some kind of missionary.

Admittedly, parturition isn’t the only hazard of unprotected sex.  There’s a whole gamut of STDs just waiting to trip you up.  Even professionals are at risk.  To wit: San Fernando’s entire porn industry ground to a halt after it was revealed that prolific adult film star Mr. Marcus contracted syphilis on set and subsequently altered his industry-required STD test so that he could keep performing.  And for those who think oral sex provides a safer alternative, think again.  Scientists in Japan have discovered a new and incurable strain (H041) of gonorrhea.  The genetically mutated Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which readily blooms in the back of the throat, developed immunity against cephalosporins (the last antibiotics still effective against the infection) by incorporating DNA from other microbes extant in the pharynx.

So maybe, after all is considered, Catholic priests have got it right:  Either remain celibate or bugger little boys before their scoutmasters can get to them.  Which, according to documents released last week in Portland, is no easy task.  The so called “perversion files” show twenty years of systematic enabling of 1,247 perpetrators.  In one instance, a Boy Scouts of America executive wrote that despite admission of “acts of perversion with several troop members… I would like to let this case drop,” colorfully adding, “If it don’t stink, don’t stir it.”   Which is wholly illogical: how are you supposed to discern if a tenderfoot’s bung hole is truly rank without sticking your finger up there?

Yet there are larger issues at play.  In fact, the infallibility of the Catechism itself is in grave doubt after an ancient Coptic text surfaced in which Jesus refers to “my wife.”  Dr. Karen L. King, a chair-holder at the Harvard Divinity School, opined that the papyrus fragment is consistent with texts from fourth-century Egypt.  “It’s obviously an important find,” noted Carl R. Holliday, theology professor at Emory University, before admonishing “all scholars to be really cautious about how we proceed.”   As a sidebar, Donald Trump has offered to give Jesus $5 million in return for a copy of his marriage license.

Perhaps it is most surprising that Rick Perry and the Christian right haven’t taken to the airwaves, blaming hurricane Sandy on all the gays and liberals inhabiting the Eastern seaboard.  Notably, the exact moment Sandy was forming in the Caribbean, a federal appeals court in New York ruled – as had the First Circuit in Boston – that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional.  America’s version of the Pope, Chick-Fil-A president Dan T. Cathy, you may recall, eerily forewarned of the devastation visited upon the Jersey shore and lower Manhattan when he declared back in July, “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ “  To be honest, I thought we were in the clear when the company’s Vice President of Public Relations Don Perry was felled by a heart attack soon thereafter, but now I’m not so sure.

And like many left-wingers, I decided to boycott chicken and eat more fish as a means of protest. Until, of course, I learned that a worker at a Bumble Bee tuna processing plant had been cooked to death in an industrial oven.  An OSHA spokesman called the accident a “horrendous tragedy,” but quickly noted that cans of white albacore produced on the fateful shift were still 100% “dolphin safe.”

Casting the Big Apple as some modern day Sodom or Gomorrah does seem farfetched until you consider that NYPD officer Gilberto Valle had planned to kidnap, cook and eat 100 women, many of whom he had actively spied on.  Regarding one potential victim, he wrote, “I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus… cook her over a low heat and keep her alive as long as possible… She does look tasty, doesn’t she?”  I don’t know, Gil, but maybe if God really wanted you to eat her, she would have been born as a corned beef sandwich.

Perhaps, in the end, God set out to punish Dinesh D’Souza, the evangelical scholar who attacked the President in “2016: Obama’s America.” D’Souza was forced to resign as president of a New York Christian college in the wake of allegations of marital infidelity.  In his time off, the Bombay-born author will append his 2007 book, What’s So Great About Christianity with a deeply personal chapter entitledWere I Muslim, I’d be Stoned to Death.