For anyone who celebrated Easter last week, the day probably followed a standard tradition: the family decked out in their Sunday finery, brunch or an early dinner centered on ham or turkey, and maybe an egg hunt for the kids. In San Francisco, however, that would have seemed stuffy and pedestrian by comparison.
There, a colorful group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – think Rocky Horror Picture Show meets The Flying Nun for the visual – held the 29th annual Hunky Jesus contest. As the name suggests, most entrants are scantily clad, and can come as characters such as “surfer Jesus” and “zombie Jesus.”
What fun! But maybe leave the kids at home to sort their jellybeans.
As part of their mission statement, the Sisters believe “all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty and use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.”
To say that the Hunky Jesus contest is “irreverent” is putting it mildly. Local Catholics have called the display blasphemous and asked the Sisters to at least hold the contest on a different day. But the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence insist the contest is all part of their mission to "promote universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt."
Of course, nothing “promotes universal joy” quite like some bearded guys prancing around in provocatively draped loin cloths. And when it comes to a pageant of men carrying crosses while half-naked and wearing heavy mascara, a little shame might be in order.
Silly and inconsequential as they may be, the Sisters are worth mentioning within the context of “religious extremism” and the brush of moral equivalency with which far too many people paint it.
Rosie O’Donnell spoke for many on the Left when she said that radical Christianity was just as dangerous to the country as radical Islam. Even within the mainstream media her brand of thinking seems to hold sway: last August, CNN ran a three part series called “God’s Warriors” where each major monotheistic religion had its turn over the coals. And the best the intrepid Christiane Amanpour could rustle up for the segment on Christianity was the political influence of Jerry Falwell and the long-defunct Moral Majority. I’m no fan of Falwell’s, but it’s tough to think of him as a “warrior” for trying to exert political influence through the democratic process. The assumption seems to be that if the Moral Majority hadn’t dissolved in 1989, they would be following Hezbollah’s lead and firing Katyusha rockets towards Hollywood and Berkeley.
The same freedoms that the Sisters, O’Donnell, and CNN all enjoy, of course, are not as appreciated by followers of radical Islam. In February, Danish security forces arrested three people – two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent - for allegedly plotting the murder of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose sketch of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban set off a firestorm of protests in 2006. (Two years later, they still don't appreciate the irony.)
Author Salman Rushdie has been on radical Islam’s Most Wanted list for nearly twenty years, ever since Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwah on his head for writing The Satanic Verses. While Rushdie has managed to avoid any would-be assassins, some people more remotely affiliated with the book were not so lucky. In 1991 the man who did the Japanese translation was stabbed to death, while his Italian counterpart was assaulted in the same month. Two years later, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times with hollow-point bullets by an unknown assailant, presumably not because of some misprints in the latest Norwegian Bible.
Indeed, if asked to distinguish between radicalized versions of the major religions one would not risk running out of material on Islam, whose unspoken motto is: “hate the sin, hate the sinner, hate anyone associated with the sinner, hate their country, etc.” Yet we are lead to believe that zealotry is all the same, regardless of the frequency and fervor with which it manifests itself.
Because even the Sisters must know that there is a substantive difference between those who may think someone is going to hell and those who would try to send him there.