We would have benefited from Hitch’s take, for example, on the Colorado lawmakers who in the distinguished chambers propose babies be allowed to contract AIDs as a way to discourage women from drug use and promiscuity; who equate gay people with murderers and quote ancient Leviticus authors who recommended gay people be put to death for the grave sin of same-sex attraction; who discount anti-gay discrimination as fabricated because no such discrimination has been experienced by them; and who attempt to impeach judges for granting gay people equal rights as parents.

In writing on the “wide stance” that ended the career of U.S. Senator Larry Craig, Republican from Idaho, Hitchens described the telltale “extreme conservative postures” adopted in public by a certain kind of lawmaker, the shiny “breastplates of righteousness” that cry out for close inspection. Hitchens was borrowing from British author Laud Humphreys, who wrote about the “tearoom trade” in gay bathroom sex.

Here’s how Hitchens concluded his piece on men got up in breastplates of righteousness:

Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won’t have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine.

Here is Hitchens on the grotesqueries of the contemporary U.S. politics of influence and personal enrichment, featuring the Clintons and Henry Kissinger:

It was apt in a small way that the first endorser of Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state should have been Henry Kissinger. The last time he was nominated for any position of responsibility—the chairmanship of the 9/11 commission—he accepted with many florid words about the great honor and responsibility, and then he withdrew when it became clear that he would have to disclose the client list of Kissinger Associates.

Here is Hitchens on Pope Benedict, or Joseph Ratzinger, as he insisted on referring to him, who in the post-9/11 era speechified against Islamic violence, quoting in a 2006 speech in Germany an alleged exchange between 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II and an unnamed Persian to make his point:

‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ (On the face of it, not a very open-ended inquiry.) But, warming to his own theme, the purple-clad monarch of Constantinople allegedly added that ‘to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.’

Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion.

Here he is on the Church-of-Rome/Church-of-Hollywood phenomenon that is Mel Gibson:

We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

This schismatic crackpot sect is headed by Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, a nutty autodidact with a sideline in Holocaust denial.

A staunch supporter of the George W Bush invasion of Iraq, Hitchens later undermined the national security pretensions that led the U.S. to embrace torture by himself submitting to waterboarding, a feat none of the lawmakers pushing torture while quibbling over whether it was torture ever suggested they could match and never will. Hitchens wrote about the experience for Vanity Fair under the title “Believe me, it’s torture.”

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This fall, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was just breaking free from fallout of a vast abuse scandal when the high-profile abuse scandal broke at Penn State University, adding new urgency to lawmaker efforts to reform state statutes of limitations in order to give victims more time to file civil claims against abusers. Those efforts will undoubtedly garner great support among citizens but they will also surely meet savvy well-managed resistance from the Church under new Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who orchestrated successful opposition to similar efforts in Colorado as Archbishop of Denver over the past half decade.

In the mid-2000s, when shamed archdioceses around the country had come to accept so-called window legislation and paid out tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to adults who with the new laws were able to pursue justice for crimes visited upon them as children, Chaput almost single-handedly changed the course of the Church in America. He went all out to defeat similar bills in 2006 and 2008 in Colorado, setting the bar in 2006 when he directly appealed to the public and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on PR and political lobbying professionals.

People in pin-striped suits hired by the Colorado Catholic Conference leaked stories to sympathetic reporters and pressed hard on Catholic lawmakers to make the case for Chaput at the capitol. The archbishop gave interviews and wrote op-eds. He sent a formal letter opposing the legislation to be read by pastors during services throughout the archdiocese, a rare act, and had 25,000 postcards printed up for parishioners to fill out at mass and mail to lawmakers.

Chaput also launched a campaign targeting the state’s public schools, producing a list of public school teachers who had been charged with sex abuse and arguing that public schools not Catholic schools were the real site of criminal danger.

Chaput proved a master at hardball politics. His campaign was full of stretched facts and false equivalencies. Opponents outraged at his McCarthy style list of public school abusers, for example, pointed out that the public school criminals had been charged and tried but that their Catholic counterparts faced no such accountability. On the contrary, in parishes around the world, they had been shuttled away, accusations and evidence of crimes buried by Church authorities, which was the main reason advocates for victims were making the case for extending statutes of limitations. They also pointed out that public institutions were subject to open records laws that would prevent the kind of transparency dodging Church officials had engaged in for decades.

As Jeremy Roebuck reported this past August for the Pueblo Chieftan in a piece comprehensively revisiting the battle, Church lobbyists eventually “persuaded Colorado lawmakers to alter the bill to subject government groups to the same $700,000 damages limit that private institutions would now face. In so doing, the bill’s backers unwittingly opened the door to its demise…

“Teachers’ unions, lobbyists for local governments, and insurance companies soon joined the fight. And with mounting opposition from the capital’s most powerful interest groups, the bill that had sailed through committee months earlier suddenly was resoundingly voted down.”

The new sex-abuse legislation in Philadelphia is being proposed by Republican Rep Dennis O’Brien and Democratic Rep Louise Bishop, both members of the House Children and Youth Committee. The legislation will extend statutes of limitations and make it illegal for witnesses of abuse not to report what they have seen directly to law enforcement authorities.

In interviews since his transfer this summer, Chaput has said he doesn’t know why the Pope chose him to lead the flock in Philadelphia. Lawmakers there may soon come to think they know the answer based on practical experience.

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