WWJD

(Editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich and published 3/19/13 in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  Click on image and then zip on back.)

For Christ's sake!  Republicans and their Religious Reich are giving Christians a bad name, and that's beginning to wear on my last nerve.  The latest "outrage" has to do with (of all things) the selection of the Google doodle for March 31, which happened to celebrate Caesar Chavez day instead of Easter, because, of course, they are mutually incompatible.  It obviously rankled Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times as well.

There’s no intolerance like good conservative intolerance.

On Easter Sunday, Google incurred the wrath of the conservative Twittersphere when it chose to feature on its home page a portrait of California civil rights pioneer Cesar Chavez instead of Jesus Christ. Chavez, of course, was the co-founder, with Dolores Huerta, of the United Farm Workers union.

March 31, as it happens, is Cesar Chavez Day, declared in 2011 by President Obama to honor the man who did more than almost anyone else to improve the condition of migrant farmworkers in this country by leading boycotts, non-violent protests and collective bargaining. ...

To pick on Google for its "doodle" celebrating a man who devoted his life to helping the most downtrodden among us -- living, in other words, the values expressed by Christ -- smacks of the kind of bullying that conservatives are so quick to see in others. ...

This is what illusionists call “misdirection.” The real issue is not Google’s disdain for Christians. The real issue is the Republican Party’s disdain for Latinos. (Did I mention that Chavez was Mexican American?)   [Emphasis added]

First of all, let's make something clear.  Not everyone in the US is a Christian.  There are Jews, Muslims, pagans, atheists, Buddhists.  To expect to impose any version of Christianity on businesses and government is far more of a danger to our democracy than the imposition of Sharia law the morons of the Religious Reich keep mouthing off about.  There is no "War on Christianity," only a war on religious freedom being waged from the basest of the base in the GOP.

Second of all, it's time for real Christians, those of us who take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, to make it clear that this kind of behavior is nothing more than patent bovine excrement designed to catapult the propaganda of the Right Wing of the Republican party. This is shorthand hate speech:  Caesar Chavez worked hard to ensure the rights of farm workers, most of whom were Mexican.  And he did so in a manner consistent with the teachings of Jesus, whether avatar or exemplar. But we must call out the perverters of Jesus' message out with every opportunity. If the Religious Reich and the Tea Partiers can't deal with that, well, then, that's their problem. 

I'm just sick unto death that it is becoming mine.