I had been intending to ignore the Pope’s recent rant on saving humanity from “homosexual or transsexual behavior”. It is, after all, rather difficult to take lectures on gender conformity seriously when they come from an old man with a habit of wearing dresses in public. However, I then discovered this entertaining article in The Guardian.

From it I learn that homosexuality only became a crime in England because Henry VIII was looking for some sort of dubious behavior that was common amongst Catholic clergy so as to have an excuse for persecuting them.

And the article leads off with a magnificent quote from HL Mencken who described puritanism as the, “haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.”

I note, however, that the The Guardian cites Mencken as being specifically critical of religious puritanism. What little I know of the man suggests to me that he took a rather broader view of what puritanism was, and would be just as critical of the sort of political puritanism of which Guardian journalists (and indeed journalists in general) are all too fond.

I’ll leave you with a rather longer quote from Mr. Mencken:

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses—in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

I like to think that he would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.