Thank goodness for the pope! He’s looking out for us. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI spoke to Vatican diplomats from almost 180 different countries in an effort to rally the faithful to Church doctrine and safeguard the world from a dire threat “to the future of humanity itself.”

Good for him, right? If humanity is facing disaster, I like to think it’s a good thing that the religious leader of 1.18 billion souls worldwide is speaking up about it. With power like that, he could single-handedly change the world. Imagine it. Feed the hungry, protect the children, stop wars and the wanton destruction of the natural world. With all the multitude of catastrophic problems facing the human race in 2012, it couldn’t have been easy to decide what to focus on. So I’m sure you’re wondering by now just which threat to the future of humanity the pope was talking about.

You might guess overpopulation. That’s a pretty scary one. But no. Church doctrine pretty much helped to swamp the lifeboat on that one by adhering to its ancient stance against any form or artificial birth control. How about terrorism, global warming, a deadly viral pandemic? Nope. None of those. The pontiff wasn’t talking about the stuff of nightmares. He had something more domestic in mind, something connubial, something downright festive, really. He was talking about gay marriage.

Consider this:

via People magazine

Here are Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi at their wedding. They’re happy. They’re in love. They’ve just dedicated their lives to each other. It must be the beginning of the end for all humanity.

Okay, I admit I’m having a little trouble following the Pope’s logic. If I understand it correctly, he believes (sorry, correction: He knows, because the Holy Spirit keeps him in line with divine design in matters of his office and so he is, therefore, infallible) – so he knows that by legalizing gay marriage, the state of New York, for example, has opened the door for people like Neil Patrick Harris and his boyfriend to marry as well, thus leading the world down a path toward certain catastrophe.

via People magazine

Just look at them. They’re rich, smart, fantastically devoted to their adopted children, and let’s face it, just absolutely adorable. It’s insidious. They want to provide their children with a safe, nurturing environment with two loving parents in which to grow up. How dare they?

So I guess I’m a little dense because I’m still fuzzy about the details about how this endangers humanity, especially since gay men and women are practicing the Vatican’s favorite (and only approved) form of birth control – abstinence from heterosexual sex, and in many cases, they are providing homes for orphaned children. You’d think that would be a good thing, right? Apparently, not.

So I pondered it for a while and came up with this. Let’s see what you think:

The pope made his announcement shortly after the beginning of 2012, the very year the ancient Mayan calendar reportedly predicts the end of the world. That can’t be coincidence, can it?

Mayan calendar created by a modern

craftsman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the way I figure it, another U.S. state is going to pass a law legalizing gay marriage (like New York did!) or fail to illegalize it twice over (like North Carolina is trying to to). This will royally tick off the pontiff (because nothing pisses him off so much as uppity Americans who insist on thinking for themselves), and then the Bishop of Rome will have some kind of holy apoplectic fit, eventually reach supreme pontifical supercritical mass which will cause a righteous chain reaction and melt down, and thereby precipitate the end of the world and extinction of “humanity itself.”

And proving the Mayans right. Except they didn’t know to blame it on the gays.

What’s that? Yeah, it sounds a little lame to me too. So how about we tell the truth? People who have a common enemy are easier to control. It’s as simple as that. Pick a group of people who are different than the group you are trying to control, demonize your victims, convince your followers they are superior to the victims, lead them against the victims, and suddenly, you have yourself some serious mind control. It worked for Hitler.

The Pope ought to know. He was there.