Unicode and the Pope
I keep thinking that
Unicode
has everything, but it turns out that it doesn’t. In particular, there’s a
collection of emoji
that’s been proposed, but hasn’t been approved by the powers that be.
The reason I bring this up is that recently, the pope made some
remarkably boneheaded comments; naturally, people pointed and laughed,
because that’s what you do when someone says something embarrassingly
stupid.
In response, the Catholic News Service published
a story
chiding people for that:
ROME (CNS) — Mockery is not acceptable in public discussions, especially when the subject is the pope, said the president of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference.
[…]“We will not accept that the pope, in the media or anywhere else, is mocked or offended,” said Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, opening the spring meeting of the permanent council of the Italian bishops’ conference.
I hope that emoji proposal passes; that way, the next time something
like this happens, I’ll be able to write
<span style="font-size: 1">💚</span>
to represent the world’s smallest violin, playing for the poor little
WATBs
and their hurt feelings. To quote Bender, “Oh, wait. You’re
serious. Let me laugh even harder.”
Meanwhile, maybe someone can explain to the Catholic church that if
they don’t like being ridiculed, they shouldn’t say such ridiculous
things.
Seriously, is this the best they have left? People shouldn’t make fun
of religious people because it hurts their feelings?
Oh, and the article also says:
The pope has often urged the world to become “more God-fearing while building a society based on humanitarian values and moral principles of life,” they said.
Maybe the problem is that he’s trying to pull in opposite directions:
it’s hard to build a society “based on humanitarian values and moral
principles” while at the same time telling them to be afraid of a
magic man in the sky. Drop the fear and the superstition, and then
we’ll talk.