Why Did a Progressive Pope Use a Gay Slur? Pope Francis leading the weekly general audience in Vatican City. (Massimo Valicchia / Getty) You could be excused for not seeing the immediate resemblance between Pope Francis, the elderly Argentinian leader of the Catholic Church, and Harrison Butker, the square-jawed young kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs. The two aren't often mentioned in the same breath, though both have been roundly criticized in recent weeks for controversial statements.

Francis used the word frociaggine, an Italian slur that can best be translated as "faggotry," in a discussion about admitting gay men to seminaries during a closed-door session of the Italian Bishops' Conference. While giving a commencement speech at a Catholic liberal arts college, Butker derided LGBTQ pride as a "mortal sin" and asserted that women's lives really begin when they become (heterosexual) wives and mothers. Many will simply dismiss all this as the atavistic attitudes of two Catholic troglodytes.

But Francis and Butker have something far more basic in common, something they share with the protagonist of a delightful Anglo-Norman medieval romance called Lanval (hear me out). Lanval, a knight in Arthur's court, refuses the sexual advances of the queen. When she accuses him of preferring the company of boys to her own, Lanval angrily responds that he is faithfully in love with a woman whose beauty far surpasses that of the queen.

A huge mistake. Not only is the queen furious but the.