In his final message as editor-in-chief of Circulation Research (the journal of the American Heart Association), Dr. Roberto Bolli spent several paragraphs telling fellow doctors to embrace prayer and the possibility of God’s existence.

If that seems unusual for a prestigious medical journal… that’s because it is. But Bolli must have figured he had nothing to lose, given that the main reason he was fired from that position was due to his faith-based bigotry.

Let’s back up for a bit. In 2018, Bolli received a promotional flyer from the Louisville Ballet about its show Human Abstract. It showed two men holding hands while wearing ballet tights.

I am shocked and profoundly offended by the brochure that the Louisville Ballet sent me on March 3, 2018 (I return it to you). You have reached a new low. Your company is now promoting sodomy and homosexuality… Stop sending this filth to my house! I don’t want my house to be sullied by this lurid sewage. You should be ashamed of promoting perversion, immorality, and filth. I will never attend a ballet performance again, and I will tell all my friends and colleagues not to attend your shows. I will tell them what you do. Your organization is EVIL. You people are minions of Satan, polluting our culture with your repugnant ideology and peddling perversion and immorality. Thank you for contributing to the decay of our culture.

Bolli couldn’t handle it, and he sent a nasty email to the Ballet…. a copy of which was leaked, redacted, and published by the website Arts Writing is Dead . (He later confirmed he was the writer .)

That is Ben Carson-level batshittery. Minions of Satan? Promoting sodomy through ballet? The repugnant ideology of dance?!

Bolli sent that from his personal email address, but the problem wasn’t just his disgust for the show or the language he used. It’s the idea that a man who may have gay patients felt such disdain for their very existence. This wasn’t some random guy either. Bolli is a cardiovascular physician with the University of Louisville, the chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at the medical school, and the editor-in-chief of the AHA’s journal Circulation Research.

The school quickly denounced his email but there wasn’t much they could do beyond that since he expressed his bigotry on personal time and there was no evidence his bigotry played out in the hospital. Bolli himself insisted that he treated all patients, “including queer patients, with the utmost compassion and respect.”

But the AHA decided his faith-based hate was unacceptable and relieved him of his position.

“Dr. Bolli has become the subject of public scrutiny in light of comments he has made that have been alleged to be hate speech,” said Greg Donaldson, a senior vice president for the association. “The American Heart Association has a zero tolerance policy with respect to personal conduct that conflicts with its guiding values and its commitment to an environment that embraces diversity and inclusion and values cultural, racial, gender and other differences to help it succeed in achieving its mission and goals.” Donaldson said the AHA thanks Bolli for his service to the journal and to the organization.

And that brings us to Bolli’s final article for Circulation Research, published online a few days ago. He spends much of it celebrating the journal’s accomplishments — his accomplishments — over the past decade without ever mentioning why he won’t be continuing in his role.

At the very end, he has a section titled “A Prayer,” which is nothing more that a plea for scientists to reject science in favor of his religion.

I pray that we realize that the events that we describe as “random” may, in fact, be the necessary consequences of preceding events that we do not know or cannot measure and that, therefore, nothing may be truly random. I pray that we keep an open mind, that we allow scientific evidence to lead us wherever it may even when this challenges materialistic biases, and that we eschew the bigotry of rejecting nonmaterialistic explanations solely because they make us feel uncomfortable or do not fit our prejudice that everything around us must have a materialistic cause. I pray that we start questioning how stochastic, aimless collisions of molecules could have assembled a living cell — an astonishing marvel of engineering that no biologist, harnessing all the power of our intelligence, foresight, and reason and all our modern resources, computers, knowledge, and technology, could dream of assembling. May we admit that it takes more faith to believe that life came about and evolved only by random chemical reactions than to believe in a supernatural reality. I pray that the wall that divides science from religion be taken down, for it is through science that we get a glimpse of the infinite power and intelligence of our Creator… I pray that each discovery, each paper, each study that illuminates the unfathomable complexity of life be a hymn to His glory. In this sense, I pray that we recognize that biology is, ultimately, theology.

Damn… He must be really desperate for some of that sweet sweet Templeton Prize money, which goes to scientists who pay just enough lip service to religion.

He used his final article to promote the fallacies of Intelligent Design, tell researchers to settle for “God did it” as a legitimate explanation, and argue that science is nothing more than a quest to discover God’s Master Plan.

The only time he used the word “bigotry” wasn’t to write about his own mistakes; it was to describe scientists who write off the supernatural.

That’s not a mic drop. That’s a broken amplifier. These are the pathetic whines of a man whose reputation is in tatters and decides he might as well become a Christian martyr.

(Screenshot via YouTube. Thanks to Robert for the link)