All I Want to Say About Bernie and the Pope

Is that a trip to the Vatican sounds pretty "establishment" to me.

Between calling Hillary Clinton "unqualified" and taking time out of his campaign to associate with one of the most historic purveyors of institutional sexism and homophobia, it's almost like Bernie Sanders' campaign is running a "How to lose feminist voters" tutorial.

That's not to say some feminists aren't voting for him, of course. Politics is complicated. No candidate's going to align 100% with our policies and ideals.  My experience thus far on social media with respect to Sanders is, however, that their "revolution" (it doesn't even, to me, feel like "our" revolution, if it ever did) will be led by angry white guys seeing a "corporate conspiracy" at every turn, forwarding paranoid chain emails without checking them on Snopes first, and gaslighting women on whether or not sexism even exists anymore.

I've been doing progressive politics long enough to be wary of any purported revolution that appears to privilege addressing economic issues over women's and LGBT rights.  It's like, oh - suddenly Team Progressive Revolution likes the Vatican because the Pope seems cool on economic injustice even though he's still horrible on abortion, gender equality, and LGBT rights?

Some of Sanders' supporters are, of course, using his visit to once again imply he's a holy, pure entity, something they like to do via meme. Perhaps at some point they'll be lucky enough to get some cool pics of Bernie and the Pope feeding birds together!

That would just be divine.

Meanwhile, I shrug at the possible (and increasingly unlikely) change in management.