Easter under attack (again)

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.