I don’t think you understand how hard it can be, guys. Having a patriarchal monotheistic God, who only used to talk to illiterate nomadic desert peoples, yammering in your ear 24-7 is super tough! It’s always “Don’t use condoms! Your sperm is the cereal and your wife’s vagina is the bowl, and spilling cereal outside the bowl is just a waste of cereal!” or “Only sluts, democrats, feminists, and atheists give blow jobs!” or “Gay people invaded Constantinople in 1453, sacked the Christian Byzantine capital, and had lots of gay butt sex in the Hagia Sofia! Punish them!”

Rick’s trying, he really is. And he can’t possibly understand why the rest of you wouldn’t be totally chill with living under God’s law, like he does. Rick’s a multi-millionaire! Rick has a series of lovely, be-flanneled children! Rick has extremely well coifed follicles that suggest he has commendable taste in conditioners! All of which have been bestowed upon him by a selectively benevolent, selectively omnipotent, selectively forgiving God, presumably through some sort of punch-card reward program that Rick fulfilled by saying “sodomy” on television a few hundred times.

Have you ever tried to be Rick? Have you ever had to Google your own name and immediately feel paranoid because you don’t know what “frothy” means, and the best you can hope for is that it means “totally the opposite of”? Have you ever felt the enormous emotional burden of seeing two gay guys walking down the street holding hands and suddenly not be able to scrub the image of a Labradoodle in a wedding dress out of your mind? Have you ever tried to get glitter out of your hair? I didn’t think so. The rest of the world expects us Americans to be a bunch of closed-minded, bigoted, sexist, bible-literalist morons, and right now Rick is carrying the majority of that burden all by himself on his soft vanilla shoulders. Cut him a break, will you? I mean it’s not like Rick’s a lady hater. He’s just looking out for all the upper middle class white babies that wouldn’t be born enough to solve important world problems like expunging the homosexuals if women were given unfettered access to birth control and abortions. Because let’s be honest: all women always want to have abortions.

You know how, back when Galileo was all, “The earth revolves around the sun!” And the Catholic Church was all “Fuck that noise! The sun revolves around the earth, you stinky Italian heathen!” And Galileo refused to back down, because he’d done “experiments” and found “evidence” and drew “hypothesized conclusions” and eventually arrested him? Well Rick is a modern-day Galileo, everybody. It’s really hard to stick to your guns, such as the Christian Crusades were in no way an anti-Islamic act of aggression or  intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory, when big bullying establishments like the scientific community and intelligent people writ large insist on persecuting you for your beliefs simply because they’re based on blind, untenable, laughably antiquated dogma rather than stuff like, you know, factual things. If Rick closes his eyes and squints really hard and puts both his pointer fingers in his ears and shouts “LALALALALALA I’M NOT LISTENING LALALALALALALALA,” then he can definitely see himself as the victim of persecution.

On Sundays, Rick has the unfortunate burden of having to slap his wife across the face if she talks in church (1 Corinthians 14:34). At home, he has to be the one to set his daughter’s closet of clothes alight when it’s discovered she’s been wearing plaid jumpers that are made of a polyester/cotton blend (Leviticus 19:19). Or worse yet, he has to not do these things, which requires a pretty extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance that I just don’t think you guys are really appreciating.

Do you know what it feels like to have to deactivate your Pinterest account because all of the pictures of the Virgin Mary that you’d re-pinned on your “Thx 4 Saving Me, Jesus! Xoxo, Rick” board were starting to give you raging boners? It feels like defeat. Because you can’t just masturbate that shit away, and then with a clear head be like, “Oh, phew. Guess I’m not sexually attracted to the mother of my Lord and savior after all.” You just have to sit there, the Devil’s sin-filled meat log staring up at you, and live with the knowledge that you just might want to bang the Madonna.

Rick’s just trying to live his life the way he wants to, people. And the only way he knows how to do that is by making sure you don’t get to do the same.

–Katie Sisneros