Well, it’s December. It’s that time of year when we all get together and make nice-nice and celebrate the [symbolic] birth of our Lord and Savior (if you’re Christian), the prophet ‘Issa bin Maryam (if you’re Muslim), that dude everyone uses to justify being nasty to people (if you’re just about anyone else) and wish people peace and love by shooting them in malls in Nebraska, blowing up car bombs in Algiers and Beirut, and talking about maybe eventually thinking about the possibility of beginning negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

And it seems that His Imperial Eminence the Pope has announced that gay marriage is an obstacle to world peace. According to the Vatican, and I quote:

“Presenting the nuclear family as the ‘first and indispensable teacher of peace’ and the ‘primary agency of peace,’ the 15-page document links sexual and medical ethics to international relations. ‘Everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of new life … constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace,’ Benedict writes.”

As someone who works in Middle Eastern Studies, I must admit to being torn here. I’m so used to reading about how Muslims are out to destroy the universe that I keep forgetting that it’s really the gays who are hell bent on bringing Western civilization to an end. Thank heaven Mike Huckabee is there to remind me.

And if you’re gay and Muslim: RUN!!!!!!

I’ve read a lot of poppycock in my day on both topics (no, Virginia, Muslims are not hiding under your bed and waiting for you to fall asleep so that they can staple a hijab on your head. Really), but I would like to respond to the pope’s message with the following well-reasoned and eloquent answer:

Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?

Seriously. India and Pakistan got nukes pointed at each other. The Taliban keep coming back in Afghanistan, despite the best attempts of spin doctors between here and Kabul to convince us that we’re “winning.” Iran might be after nuclear weapons, or they might not — it’s pretty obvious we don’t actually know. Lebanon is on the verge of disintegrating (again). Iraq has disintegrated, and we’re trying to put it back together. Al-Qaeda is blowing up office buildings in Algeria. AIDS is still going to kill a third of Africa. The ice caps are melting faster than we originally thought, and yet we’re still having a debate about whether or not global warming is real or imagined. There’s a world financial crisis triggered by something called the “sub-prime mortgage market” that I don’t actually understand, I just know that I spent a ridiculous amount of money in Canada because apparently the American dollar isn’t worth the cloth it’s printed on (and yes, American dollars are printed on cloth, not paper. Look it up.)

But, no, clearly what’s causing all of this — even all that stuff going on in countries where they don’t like gays (which are just about all the ones I’ve mentioned, ‘cept Canada)–is that gay people can’t get married. Thanks so much for the clarification.

This, for the record, is one of the many, many reasons why I lost my respect for organized religion a long time ago. If it sounds like groupthink and it quacks like groupthink, it’s groupthink. If you ask me, organized religion is the biggest threat to world peace we have. If God is a formless being who lives on another dimension — why’s the pope so rich, exactly?

It’s too bad we can’t just get along because we’re all human and embrace our differences rather than reviling each other over them. Once we take the fear out of the “other,” we understand ourselves better.

So, that’s what I want for Christmas: a peace that works. Who’s with me?