Good times.
Right-wingers’ obsession with what they see as secular assaults on Jesus and the fiesta of capitalism with which we mark his birth are no longer confined to December.
The craziness has metastasized, blown past December into the rest of the year, expanding faster than plans for the White House ballroom.
It’s not just for Christmas anymore: According to MAGA politicians and their hangers-on, there’s now a full-blown War on Christians.
When Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier discovered a city-owned theater in Pensacola was hosting “A Drag Queen Christmas” on Dec. 23, he blew a gasket.
The show features stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” one of the most popular television programs in America.
“A Drag Queen Christmas” is touring the United States, appearing in mainstream venues such as the Knoxville, Tenn., Civic Center and Atlanta Symphony Hall.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think a whole lot of regular Americans like drag shows.
Uthmeier is not among them. In a ranty and perhaps a tad prurient letter to the Pensacola City Council, the fellow who likes to call himself “Florida’s Top Cop” expressed outrage over Pensacola children taking pictures with Santa outside while “men dressed as garish women in in demonic costumes will be engaged in obscene behavior mere feet away.”
More equal
According to Uthmeier, “The show openly mocks one the most sacred holidays in the Christian faith” and must be canceled post-haste.
He goes on, noting, “A previous production featured a male performer boasting the stage name Trinity ‘The Tuck’ Taylor — a not-so subtle stab at THE fundamental doctrine of Christianity.”
The city of Pensacola has refused to shut down the show.
Perhaps Uthmeier has decided he no longer need concern himself with school shootings, environmental poisoning, and other minor inconveniences, and can devote all his energies to protecting the faith.
While he loudly threatens to throw the book at real or perceived incidents of antisemitism, really the only faith he’s most interested in protecting is his own.
Just ask the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, suing Gov. Ron DeSantis over his dubious (and likely unconstitutional) attempt to designate them as “terrorists.”
Uthmeier’s chomping at the bit to defend that case.
I guess all religions are equal, but some religions are more equal than others.
Those of us attached to, say, facts, evidence, reality, that stuff, know there is no War on Christianity, any more than there is now, or ever was, a War on Christmas.
America has no Emperor Diocletian ordering the Roman army to take their axes to Christians or roast them on grates, no Boko Haram murdering Christian children, no Chinese secret police arresting pastors.
Especially in Florida.
Here we see increasing attacks on Muslims, assaults (both physical and statutory) on LGBTQ people, and out-and-proud racism: Florida leads the nation in hate groups.
Apostasy at SCOTUS?
Uthmeier is on a crusade (and I use that word advisedly).
He’s angry at the American Bar Association for investigating the St. Thomas University College of Law, a Roman Catholic insitution in Miami.
The ABA accredits law schools, making sure they’re in good financial shape, they don’t discriminate, they’re fair in hiring and retention, and they treat people equally.
Seems St. Thomas didn’t exactly ace the test.
Uthmeier could have helped STU clean up its act. Instead, he wrote one of his belligerent letters, accusing the ABA of being “woke” lefties practicing “religious discrimination” against Roman Catholics and said the organization cannot use its “accreditation monopoly to put law schools to the tortuous choice of accepting the ABA’s discriminatory, repugnant standards or suffering the fallout of withheld accreditation.”
This might be a good time to mention that Uthmeier is a product of Georgetown Law School, a Catholic institution duly accredited by the ABA.
Instead of, say, working to stop gun violence, domestic abuse, and insurance fraud (to name but a few of the state’s besetting issues), he signed on to a brief supporting a couple of Christian schools’ desire to pray over loudspeakers before their football games.
Courts pointed out the schools would be proselytizing using public spaces with publicly funded sound systems, which suggests government endorsement of a particular religion.
They said no.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
Uthmeier huffed, “The Constitution does not require state-sponsored hostility toward religion.”
Undaunted, he wrote a stiff note to Microsoft about the mega-corp.’s policies toward software discounts for faith-based groups.
Microsoft is, he said, “hostile” to Christian nonprofits.
The governor’s Bible
Among the nonprofits he’s referring to are so-called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” which claim to provide “medical care” for desperate young women who don’t want or can’t care for a child.
The young women at these places get a lot of guilt-inducing fundamentalist propaganda, but no information on how to get an abortion, even if they want one.
By the way, these CPCs are largely funded with taxpayer money.
Lately, the governor’s been going around boasting Florida has been named the No. 1 state for religious freedom.
This distinction was conferred by First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal outfit, the ones who went to the U.S. Supreme Court to save a pious Oregon pâtissière from having to make a gay wedding cake.
Hooray for the Sunshine State.
Nonetheless, DeSantis, Uthmeier, and D.C. MAGAs say the fight to save Christians from secular, indeed, Satanic, persecution remains urgent.
In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on made-up stories of crazed heathens somehow banning the phrase “Merry Christmas” and, even weirder, destroying crosses: “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags.”
(Side note: Anybody know where I can buy a “social justice flag”?)
Trump added, “I’m a very proud Christian.”
DeSantis is also a “proud Christian,” so pious that for the swearing-in at his first inauguration, staff had to order a Bible from Amazon for $21.47.
He didn’t own one.
Florida Woman and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, yet another proud Christian, has established a Justice Department task force to combat “anti-Christian policies.”
Members of this task force include such noted followers of Jesus as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Perhaps the Spanish Inquisition will provide a useful model for them.
Who’s really being persecuted?
But let’s go back to Pensacola’s “Drag Queen Christmas.”
Uthmeier assumes that the very idea of a man rocking a smokey eye and glittering evening wear is so inherently sinful any exposure to such a thing imperils your immortal soul.
Why, what if a child picks up a stray, wind-borne sequin from Jewels Sparkles’ dress? Will the parents need to call an exorcist?
The attorney general and his fellow hysterics might be interested to learn some drag queens are Christian.
One, a fabulous red-headed singer sporting the splendid name “Flamy Grant,” topped the Christian music charts with the 2023 album, “Bible Belt Baby.”
Let’s smack Uthmeier, DeSantis, et al. (gently) with the reality stick:
There is no persecution of Christians in America.
The persecuted are those who belong to disfavored cultures — Afghan or Latino or Black — those who express their sexuality in a disfavored way or speak out disfavored opinions.
You can’t find anything in the New Testament where Jesus endorses cruelty or murder.
The Great Commandment (Matthew 22:39) says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The foreigner, the exile, the refugee should be welcomed to your country (Matthew 5:43, Hebrews 13:1, Romans 13.10).
There’s no mention of rounding them up, beating them, and sending them off to torture prisons or countries where they’re likely to be killed.
Jesus did not endorse bombing people clinging to a capsized boat.
Jesus didn’t say to torment people over their sexuality or their fashion sense.
Sure, Deuteronomy 22:5 says women shouldn’t dress as men (better lose those pantsuits, Bondi!) and men shouldn’t dress as women, but Deuteronomy also says if a wife tries to save her husband from an attacker by grabbing the guy’s genitals, she must have her hand cut off (25:11-12); you can’t eat pork, shrimp, or lobster; and if you commit adultery, you will be stoned to death.
I doubt the president and his Secretary of Defense would want to embrace that one.
The point is, what Uthmeier, Bondi, Hegseth, Kennedy, Trump, DeSantis, and their ilk espouse is performative hatred, not Christianity.
Perhaps we should all pray for them.
- Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
- Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
