the puppy episode
Ramona, I'm in lesbians with you.
“All every woman really wants, be it mother, senator, nun, is some serious deep-dickin'.”
-Jason Lee in Chasing Amy
For about the past six months, Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is has been doing a lot of work on Fr. Chad Ripperger, a Colorado priest and social media personality whose bizarre far-right views have recently cost him some church speaking engagements. Lewis’ pieces are thoroughly researched and worth reading, although I want to call attention to one piece of Ripperger's output that Lewis highlighted: his talk on “the five generals”, the demons who do Satan's bidding. Someone actually sent me that video back in the fall and was like “check out this Ripperger guy you should write about him”; I didn't end up doing that and instead put my time towards other serious theological reflection, but wow he's really on one here:
“Underneath Satan, there are what we call the five generals. The five generals are the five demons that are immediately hierarchically underneath Satan, and they are the ones who execute his plans. … The first demon under him is Baal. Baal — now, Satan actually is the demon of impurity — but Baal is a demon of impurity. His principal function is to get cultures to succumb to impurity, primarily through fornication…The next three demons show up. The first is Asmodeus, he’s the demon of homosexuality in men. Then there’s the demon of Leviathan, which is the demon of homosexuality in [women], but of the masculine kind. (These are the women who are heavy on the heels, we would say.) Okay. Then, there is the spirit of Lilith, which is the more seductive form of female homosexuality…Baphomet is the fifth one, and he’s the demon of child sacrifice. Abortion.”
Now, you've already figured this out, but that's all made up. It's not in scripture, it's not in church teaching, I don't even think Dante had this, and he was like the main guy when it came to making stuff like this up. If you, off the top of your head, made up your own org chart of Hell, you would be just as likely as Ripperger to be correct. And this appears to be what Ripperger does, a lot: he just makes up shit, all of the time, and he presents it with an air of expertise and some jargony words to make his audience think it's official church teaching. There's plenty of what Ripperger has presented as truth in the past that is conventionally harmful or stupid: he has claimed that bipolar disorder isn't real and is actually demonic possession, he has warned us to stay vigilant against the witches who are hexing Donald Trump, and he thinks the theory of evolution is made up. But I do want to focus on that block quote above, because hidden in there is something that Ripperger believes is true, thinks is affecting the state of the world today, and is so important that he needs to tell a live audience and his sizeable online following. It's not that there's a single demon dedicated to male homosexuality, no; it's that female homosexuality requires two demons each working at full capacity, apparently dividing butch and femme souls based on their respective areas of expertise. Every week at the team check-in on Zoom, Asmodeus goes “yeah just chugging along here…should be fine” meanwhile Leviathan and Lilith are constantly getting dragged into meetings that could have been emails, having to write “per my previous message please direct these requests to Lilith,” getting passed over for transfers because “we really can't afford to have only one demon on lesbianism right now it's peak season”, complaining that Satan always sets the AC too high.