In any event, I do hope the divine-right-to-abortion crowd will forgive their co-religionists if we roll our eyes a little while they pretend for five minutes to care what the pope thinks about x, y, or z, but only when it serves partisan Democratic interests to do so, or when they pronounce with Falwellian certitude that Jesus would have supported a cap-and-trade regime or federal subsidies for sex-change operations, or that some notion of Bible-based morality renders tax reform impossible. We could all do with fewer lectures on “grace” from the people who would dispatch federal bayonets to force septuagenarian nuns to underwrite contraception coverage in order to press a petty political advantage for no purpose other than precedent and humiliation.

I will not presume to speak on behalf of the Almighty — Who has not, as a matter of fact, requested my opinion on the matter — but even taking into account that the Lord works in mysterious ways and that He seems to have a bizarre and occasionally cruel sense of humor, it is difficult to imagine an omnipotence worth having that is constrained to express itself through the instrument of Pete Buttigieg, who looked at creation and saw that it was . . . messed up.