Posted on 12/07/2002 10:15:49 PM PST by 11th_VA
REMEMBER ALL the commotion a few years back over a reader for public schoolchildren called "Heather Has Two Mommies"? Well, guess what. Now Jesus does, too.
"Jesus Has Two Mommies," billed as a lesbian rock opera, is scheduled to open this weekend at the Somerville Theatre in Somerville, Mass. According to this charming little play, Jesus is the child of two lesbians, whose affair at a lesbian bar ("the hottest lesbian bar in all Nazareth — the Burning Bush") is presented as the "real Christmas story." Well, gee, it sure sounds like the Gospel of Luke, doesn't it? It even has an angel named "Gay-briel." Cute.
A Catholic organization called America Needs Fatima has been circulating postcards for people to mail to the Somerville Theatre (55 Davis Square, Somerville, MA 02144) to express their outrage over this blasphemous "nativity scene."
It won't do any harm, but it probably won't do much good, either. The people who run the theater have probably figured out by now that the kind of folks who fill out and circulate petitions like that are generally not big theatergoers, anyway. The pagan culture against which the protesters are taking their stand has already become dominant on stage, as it has on films and TV.
We have come a long way from the days of the Legion of Decency, when Catholics used to stand in the pews once a year and pledge not to patronize "indecent" motion pictures. Though the practice may seem quaint now, at the time it sent a powerful message to Hollywood.
It said that church-going members of the largest block of Christians in predominantly Christian America would be voting with their dollars against the kind of motion-picture fare that degraded the human person by glorifying casual sex and extreme violence. It warned filmmakers they stood to lose an important segment of the market by promoting smut and blood lust.
Today, Catholics are no less likely than the population as a whole to support the decadence spawned by Hollywood or to patronize works of "art" that mock their faith and blaspheme their Savior. Given the large Catholic population in the area, there will probably be more than a few hip, sophisticated, thoroughly "with-it" Catholics in the audience at the Somerville Theatre for performances of "Jesus Has Two Mommies."
Religion may have some important, albeit small and ambiguous, place in society, but art is art, after all. And why should our religious convictions, assuming we have some, have any effect on the kind of art we patronize or how we spend our dollars in the public market?
Americans vote with their dollars all the time in the "marketplace of ideas," frequently giving little or no thought to the consequences of the ideas they are promoting. Parents routinely pay a king's ransom to send their progeny to prestigious colleges and universities where freshman initiation rituals require the initiates to publicly pronounce themselves "gay" or "lesbian" in order to increase their "awareness" or "sensitivity."
Parents who pay the bills for higher education (higher than what?) may not like this kind of institutionalized brainwashing (assuming they are even aware of it), but they generally don't complain. They just sign the checks as the price they pay for their child's sheepskin.
Christians are called upon to be salt and light in the world, but we do find myriad ways to trample the salt under foot and hide our light under a wide variety of bushels.
Today, many are rightly outraged by the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, most notably in the archdiocese of Boston. Yet I can't help wondering how many of those now calling for Cardinal Law's resignation were among the voters who kept reelecting and reelecting Gerry Studds to the U.S. House of Representatives, long after that Massachusetts congressman had been censured by his colleagues for his homosexual affair with a teenage congressional page.
Well, Studds was good at protecting the fishing interests of his district, I guess. And, oh yes, he was awfully good on "women's issues," especially the right to kill babies as a matter of "choice."
Ten years ago, when "Heather Has Two Mommies" was part of the grade school curriculum for New York City schools, Pat Buchanan was widely criticized for declaring that a cultural war was going on in America.
The reaction brought to mind what Ronald Reagan once said about the Soviet reaction to the American military build-up of the early 1980s: "They liked the arms race better when they were the only ones in it." Some people like the culture war just fine when only one side is waging it. And most Americans today are not even conscientious objectors. Because we're not very conscientious. And not many are objecting.
Jack Kenny is a New Hampshire writer whose column appears regularly.
Well, I am definitly Salty.. but I must ask what can we do to show the light?
I would never "Deny The Lord" but... the usual job, rent and general living type stuff... what can we do??
Fags are "IN" and the America? is? onboard?.. I won't hurt them, but I don't like it!!
A. He was an environmental wacko who would drive a buzzy little crapbox car made out of recycled beer cans.
B. He approved of the murder of unborn children.
C. His claim as the Son of God was a lie, since we now know that his parents were a pair of lesbians (I wonder how the artificial insemination techniques used in biblical times somehow didn't make it into print).
My guess is we will next find out that He was a connisseur of fine art who would have thoroughly appreciated seeing images of His mother covered with elephant dung and photos of vaginas cut out of porno magazines. Or maybe we'll find out He was a pedophile.
For all the crap we sometimes give to practitioners of Islam, one thing you can say for them is that they won't idly stand by while perverted liberal scum steal their sacred images and traditions so they can use them as prostitutes for the political cause de jour of the Left. And while I don't condone running through the streets with machetes hacking up non-believers, the spectacle of so-called Christians passively accepting (or revelling in) this perversion absolutely makes me want to VOMIT! It is way past time for us to stand up and tell these b@stards that enough is enough.
Some things deserve to be repeated.
Which homosexual Massachusetts Congressman was Gerry Studds?
Whas he the sodomite or the pedophile? I can never remember.
Ya think?
The play isn't that clever, the whole point is to bring in some right-wing christians to raise a big stink about it, and then the play organizers play up the situation as if free speech itself were on the line. Then they get people to watch their crappy play.
But some Christian groups ALWAYS take the bait. Why? Because they get to be on TV and in the newspaper. They're self-aggrandizing jerks who give free publicity to blasphemers just to get their name in the newspapers, too. They're actually HELPING the cause of blasphemy, and they know it.
But some Christian groups ALWAYS take the bait. Why? Because they get to be on TV and in the newspaper. They're self-aggrandizing jerks who give free publicity to blasphemers just to get their name in the newspapers, too. They're actually HELPING the cause of blasphemy, and they know it.
I agree that some so-called Christian groups are the publicity whores you describe. And yes, there is no doubt that protesting this blasphemy gives it more publicity. But if you think they are only counting on a few outraged conservative Christians to spread the word about their play, you're wrong. These people have probably sent press releases out to all the major networks and newspapers promoting the play, and they have probably spread the word far and wide on left-wing websites as well. Hell, even as we speak the New York Times is likely sending a stage critic to Somersville, MA to write the play's obligatory rave review. Once this review is published, the effort to bring the play to Broadway will begin in earnest.
The play doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be clever. It could have all the production values of a 5th grade performance of Romeo and Juliet, and it's still going to be treated as a modern-day masterpiece solely because it p!sses on the Catholic church and on Christianity. And if it looks and feels completely amateurish, why that's nothing a little bit of NEA money and some professional polishing can't fix. We can't stop this from happening by just ignoring it and hoping it goes away.
Earlier this year, when Opie and Anthony, those two moronic NYC shock jocks, set up and aired a couple having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Christian groups such as the Catholic League created such a public uproar that these two idiots were fired, and I haven't heard anything about them coming back to radio. The usual "civil liberties" groups and the New York Times whined long and loud about how this was right-wing censorship, but the public (outside of the Upper West Side, anyhow), didn't see it that way.
The point is, Christians stood up and said "Enough is enough!", and these two boneheads paid for their act of stupidity and venality. The producers of this play need to have the same message explained to them, or their next stunt will make this one look like a tea-and-crumpets social at the Garden Club.
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