In one of the most pathetic examples this week of Republican foolishness, Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, a Catholic, has proudly announced that he’s going to skip Pope Francis’s speech to the House of Representatives, and you can probably guess why.

Writing for far right website Town Hall, Gosar explains that he’s upset the Pope won’t be talking about the stuff that obsesses him, like Planned Parenthood and the persecution of Christians (yes, that again), and will instead be focusing on climate change.

According to Gosar, climate change is based on “false science” and leftist ideology, and the climate has been changing “since first created in Genesis.”

The earth’s climate has been changing since God created it, with or without man. On that, we should all agree. In Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment (written with the consultation of that great seminary the EPA and its embattled head Gina McCarthy), he condemned anyone skeptical of the link between human activity and climate change and adopted the false science being propagated by the Left. If the Pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change then he can do so in his personal time. But to promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous.

Just one more example of the Republican Party’s complete disconnection from reality, sticking their heads in the sand while nearly every scientist in the world is sounding the warning siren over our warming climate. We could laugh it off, but unfortunately it’s deadly serious when one of America’s two political parties is locked in a self-destructive cycle of anti-science idiocy and denial.