{"id":10141,"date":"2007-03-08T11:15:27","date_gmt":"2007-03-08T16:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10141.html"},"modified":"2007-03-08T11:15:27","modified_gmt":"2007-03-08T16:15:27","slug":"easter-under-attack-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/easter-under-attack-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Easter under attack (again)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Guest Post by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-reaction.blogspot.com\/\">Michael J.W. Stickings<\/a><\/p>\n<p>No, not really. It&#8217;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&#8217;s the War on Christmas, and then, when that dies down, the War on Easter. I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, that&#8217;s not entirely true. But what <em>is<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Bill O&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/the-reaction.blogspot.com\/2007\/01\/john-gibson-is-asshole.html\">played up<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/2007\/03\/07\/gibson-easter\/\">reporting<\/a> &#8212; and, as usual, it has the video to back it up &#8212; 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2007\/03\/02\/BAGHQOE71I1.DTL\">rebranded<\/a> as the Spring Bunny.<\/p>\n<p>Ooh. Aah. Will Christianity survive?<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nGibson apparently has little faith that it will. &#8220;The question is why does the word Easter have to be expunged? Is this political correctness gone too far?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;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&#8217;s an idea: Fox News should abandon its &#8220;fair&#8221; and &#8220;balanced&#8221; coverage of the news and become the defender of religious holidays generally. <em>All of them.<\/em> That&#8217;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 <em>Christianity<\/em>?)<\/p>\n<p>Good times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings No, not really. It&#8217;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&#8217;s the War on Christmas, and then, when that dies down, the War on Easter. I&#8217;m curious to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}