Easter under attack (again)

March 8, 2007

Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings

No, not really. It’s just that Fox News is at it yet again with more paranoid fearmongering about how secularists are going after major Christian holidays like Easter. Year after year it’s the War on Christmas, and then, when that dies down, the War on Easter. I’m curious to know when the War on Lent will begin. Perhaps next year. I intend to bring it up at the next meeting of the Greater Toronto Area chapter of Militant Secularists Against Christianity (MSAC), an international pro-Enlightenment organization to which I belong.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. But what is true is the paranoid (and increasingly desperate) fearmongering at Fox News, a manifestation of the self-defining victims-R-us mentality that characterizes so much of the conservative movement.

Bill O’Reilly is sure to join the folk-flaunting fearmongering soon enough, but for now the chief fearmongerer is asshole extraordinaire John Gibson, the Fox host who played up the Obama-went-to-a-madrassa-and-may-be-a-terrorist non-story that had the right-wing bobbleheads drooling a while back. As Think Progress is reporting — and, as usual, it has the video to back it up — Gibson has been making a big deal out of certain (five-year-old) goings-on in Walnut Creek, California, where the Easter Bunny has been rebranded as the Spring Bunny.

Ooh. Aah. Will Christianity survive?

Gibson apparently has little faith that it will. “The question is why does the word Easter have to be expunged? Is this political correctness gone too far?”

I don’t feel like getting into the whole Church-and-State thing here, but it seems, if I am to follow whatever fuzzy logic there may be here, that any attempt to divide Church and State is a politically correct assault on religion, er, Christianity. (Hey, how about a War on Ramadan, or a War on Passover, or a War on Diwali? Here’s an idea: Fox News should abandon its “fair” and “balanced” coverage of the news and become the defender of religious holidays generally. All of them. That’d keep it far too busy to inflict any more partisan damage on the American people. Or is it rather that Fox News cares only about perceived wars on Christianity?)

Good times.

The EASTER BUNNY? News flash for Gibby and his pals at Faux: The Easter Bunny is a secular or pagan symbol that has frequently been attacked by devout Christians as trivializing their commemoration of the resurrection of Christ. Hell, I’m a goddam atheist, and I know that much. “The Spring Bunny” is much more fundy-friendly.

  • Jim beat me to it but I was going to make the same point. I can remember as a kid the priest reminding us that Easter was so much more than candy and fuzzy animals.

  • “Asshole Extraordinaire.” Brilliant – you need to copyright that. Gibson is so absurd it’s comical. I rarely watch him, but when I do it’s a laugh a minute. Fox Noise is wasting its time with the crappy comedy show that’s slowly dying on Sunday nights. They need to just run the highlights of Gibson’s shows that week.

  • One of the best Easter stories ever.

    In order to teach children that Easter is about Christ and not the Easter Bunny, a fundy church outside of Pittsburgh took the Easter Bunny (the church youth pastor) through the stations of the cross including the whip and the spear. The children were primarily aged 3-6.

  • Just wait, the Spring Bunny is probably just the warm-up to the real object of Gibson’s outrage…the fact that liberals are pushing natural foods and threaten to take the sacred candy ritual out of the Easter Holiday. Jeez, next thing you know, he will get outraged at an attempt to secularize Chistmas by removing Santa Claus.

  • In response I declare war on Fox and all things neo con, by simply thinking critically and speaking the truth.

  • Bunnies, eggs … it all sounds like pagan sex-worship, doesn’t it? Evergreen trees at Saturnallia/Christmas … Northern Europe’s response to Mediterranean Sun worship. Speaking of the Sun — source of Earth’s heat and light, original stimulant for life on Earth, photosynthetic basis of Earth’s food-chain, ultimate Earth’s doomsday machine — what’s wrong with Sun worship? And why won’t it ever show up here in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest?!

  • “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

    – Bertrand Russell

  • I can’t wait for Fox News or some right-wing nut spread to rationalize some sort of war on Hallowe’en as being oppressing the Christians…

  • The Easter bunny is often a source of contention amongst Christians. Its viewed by many as a pagan symbol.

    I recall that not too long ago, some fundy church held some Easter event where they took blunt objects to the rabbit to symbolize, I don’t know, something. I think Gibson and his assertions are hilarious and the fact that they’re seizing on this to further establish their oppression is further proof of the Right’s need to be victims..

  • I’m for following Bill Hicks’s advice and replacing the Easter Bunny/chocolate egg tradition:

    “Mommy, a goldfish left Lincoln Logs in my sock drawer.”

    “That’s the story of Jesus.”

  • We all know the Easter Story, right? Jeesus was crucified, but when his body was laid to rest, it wouldn’t stay put! Just like the holiest of gingerbread men, Jeesus disappeared for a few days, but it was cool, because when he came back, he had the Easter bunny with him. And the Easter Bunny had candy! So Jeesus said “Let man wage no war that threatens my furry miracle. Let all of god’s children receive the candy that is their gift from the good and merciful deity whose son i obviously am.” Then the Romans came back, decided Jeesus was just all right with them, and then they had an egg hunt.

    Dang, don’t you liberals go to Sunday school?

  • I’m curious to know when the War on Lent will begin. Perhaps next year. — Michael Stickings

    No, no, no, Michael. It’s true that I take a spear (made from the Christmas tree) to the bunny (curious… In Poland, we didn’t have a bunny. We had a lamb. And, of course, eggs. Eggs we must have to symbolise rebirth). But I stop my war on Christianity during Lent. We are supposed to give up some of our pleasures for Lent, no?

  • I don’t remember no rabbits in any Jesus Resurrection Story I’ve ever been told in Sunday school.

    Besides, I thought that Easter was all about torturing a man to death who told everyone to love thy neighbor? At least that’s what I got from folks who watched Megalomaniac Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.

  • ‘Easter” is about as “Christian” as “Christmas” is. Both were pagan holidays – one celebrating the winter solstice and the other celebrating the spring equinox in a religion that practiced harmony with the physical world – and were hijacked by the Christers as a public relations gamble to improve their standing in the religion contest.

    Funny they didn’t manage to steal the summer solstice with something or the fall equinox.

    But they did adopt the Jews’ plagiarism of Chaldean paganism – the Genesis myth adopted when the religious/political leaders were desperate to get things written down so they could maintain their religion (and thus control of the “subjects”) during the Babylonian Captivity.

    It’s all a “teapot in orbit somewhere between Mars and Pluto” to paraphrase Bertrand Russell.

  • I loved Bertrand Russell when I was a student at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco . I still do. I used to carry his “Why I Am Not A Christian” all over campus (it was forbidden reading in USF’s library) and display it prominently. His “History of Western Philosophy” (which I no longer have) had a brilliant reconstruction of Aquinas’ Five Proofs for the existence of God. After one them, the one from Order I think, this most brilliant man of the last century states simply, “I fail to follow this argument”.

    I guess you could argue that the Autumnal Equinox survives in holidays like Halloween / All Saints Day / Dia de los Muertos and perhaps our American Thanksgiving Day.

    But it is odd that Christianity never usurped the Summer Solstice, isn’t it? Maybe it’s impossible to scare the wits out of anyone (essential for the extortionate system of religion) when the sun is shining and crops are growing.

    Apropos the earlier mention of fertility-Easter, the English May pole ceremony — with young boys and girls dancing around the pole till it’s all wrapped up in ribbons — apparently originated with the ancient Greeks, who really knew how to party. They got all the unattached adolesceent boys and girls to drink and folic, capping off with the arrival of huge wooden phallus which they would all participate in unwrapping. After this they’d pair off and go into the bushes. When it was discovered which couplings had resulted in conceptions, those couples were ready for another tradition: the June wedding.

  • So sad that Gibson was unable to come to terms with the fact that the EB was really his mom/dad or legal guardian. Perhaps he’d feel better if we’d send him a basket of real chocolate eggs — you know, those ones that real bunnies lay.

  • But, but, I thought Easter was about when Jesus comes out of the tomb and sees his shadow—oops, that’s the War on Groundhog Day—sorry! I’m so confused, there’s really an equinox lagomorph?

  • Oh Lord!!!If Easter Was Truly About The Death and Ressurection of Jesus,
    Why Don’t we Simply do Away With Plush Bunnies;Eggs and Candies???
    Why??Because The Stuffed Animal Lobby;The Egg Lobby and The Candy Lobby Have A Lot Of Pull In Congress!!!
    Yeah,That’s A Good Way To Teach Your Kids About Christ’s Love:Scourge The Easter Bunny!!!

  • I wonder how long (if ever) it will be before Faux is going to be seen, even by its loyal viewers, as the boy who cried wolf?

  • Doesn’t O’Liely’s audience skew older?? Like 60+? Ah…there’s nothing like scaring the aged and infirmed. Plays right into my granny’s paranoia. “Those damned liberals are going to destroy Christmas and make men marry each other!!!”

    The good news is that thir days are, literally, numbered.

  • Who cares? If your an atheast, why would you care if “easter” is not real. If your a jew, how about we change barfmitsfa’s to ” Becoming a Man Party”, I mean I’m not a christian and I don’t care, its just a god damn name.

    • Comments are closed.