SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Pope Francis' visit to Rio on Monday, where three million people gathered on the sands of Copacabana to hear the new pontiff, was met with enthusiasm, curiosity and rapturous applause. Using language uncharacteristically candid, Pope Francis delivered a radical vision about the future governance of the Catholic Church -- a blueprint for progress and change that his predecessors would never have dared to consider. He called for young people to push the old guard from its comfort zone and take the "Church to the streets." But the most memorable moment came during a casual conversation with reporters when Francis declared, in disarmingly direct speech, that gays should not be judged. The statement elated many, confused others and led to outright dissent from the far-right faithful. The biggest shock, however, was Justice Antonin Scalia's enthusiastic agreement on Thursday: "Pope Francis is correct -- judging gays and their rights has just made the problem worse."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a watershed ruling on Wednesday by recognizing same-sex marriage in states where it has been legalized, striking down Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts the definition of wedlock as between a man and a woman for the purposes of receiving federal benefits. But anti-gay conservatives derided the ruling as a "dangerous precedent set by activist judges that will cripple the economy and immigration reform." Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, blasted the decision. Legalizing gay marriage, he declared, discriminates against people who are opposed to it. In that same vein, he also cried foul on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 for overturning segregationist Jim Crow Laws. Scalia deemed those decisions equivalently abhorrent because they discriminate against racists who don't wants blacks treated as equal citizens.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- More than 50 years after Rosa Parks helped ignite the civil rights movement in America by refusing to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus and move to the rear of the vehicle, she became the first African American woman to be commemorated with a life-size statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. The dedication ceremony was held on Wednesday, with President Obama and Parks' surviving relatives in attendance. Her act of defiance directly influenced desegregation and was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which came under fire this week by the conservative justices of the Supreme Court -- particularly Antonin Scalia who labeled one of its key provisions a "racial entitlement." Despite drawing gasps and criticisms for his comments, Scalia continued to attack the relevance of the act, citing the slippery-slope dangers of racial entitlements as propagating racial inequality. In that same spirit of profound concern, Scalia told Congress they should move Parks' statue to a less prominent position in Statuary Hall -- the back -- to downplay the perception of racial entitlement.