The Capitol rotunda, which has already seen more chaos this year than a Michele Bachmann brain MRI, recently took on a new temporary resident: A Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster display erected by a group of UW-Madison atheists, agnostics, and humanists.
The inscription reads: “Behold the Flying Spaghetti Monster! He Boiled for Your Sins! Be Touched by His Noodly Appendage Before It’s Too Late!”
Of course, the group acknowledges the absurdity of the made-up deity, writing, “Think this is ridiculous? We agree! Religious ideas should not be promoted within the halls of government. Protect the separation of Church and State, it protects us all.”
Chances are you’re either offended or amused by the group’s monument to secularism, but it underscores an inescapable fact of life: No matter what your religious beliefs, they’re bound to look utterly goofy to those who don’t believe.
Then again, it’s always considered bad taste to openly ridicule anyone else’s religion.
For instance, if you’re at a dinner party with a Scientologist and he starts nattering on and on about the evil galactic overlord Xenu, who brought billions of his subjects to Earth 75 million years ago in a spaceship that looked like a DC-8, packed them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, causing their souls (or “thetans”) to scatter and eventually infect us all with their toxic spirit energy, you’re supposed to just sit there and nod politely, casually drawing doodles of the prophet Mohammed on a cocktail napkin.
See? I just offended Madison’s Scientologists, and that’s without insisting that they be forced to gaze reverently upon my 30-foot statue of The Lawgiver from The Planet of the Apes, which I’m currently constructing from a small portion of the promotional AOL CDs I got in the mail from 1995 to ’98. (It should be ready in time for Capitol Rotunda Deity-a-Palooza 2014.)
Now, you can accuse me of being far outside the mainstream if you want, but I happen to believe I’m a fairly typical, red-blooded American lapsed Catholic/agnostic/practicing Zen Buddhist, and I think we should celebrate our religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) with as much vigor as we can muster — while keeping public land neutral.
Though I long ago stopped being Catholic, I still love Christmas, and the accusation that I’m offended by a stray “Merry Christmas” or the sight of a Christmas tree or nativity scene just boggles my mind. (Then again, why would you criticize a retailer for instructing its employees to greet customers with the more inclusive “Happy Holidays”? How on earth does it make sense to persist in saying “Merry Christmas” to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and devout atheists?)
But here’s the question I have for those who would seek to turn the Capitol rotunda into a church: You can freely place religious displays on 99.9% of the land in this country. Why are you fighting so hard to place them on the .1% of the land that we all — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, nonbelievers, and others — share? Doesn’t that seem a bit desperate?
Is your gesture really about free religious expression, or is it more about the primacy of your own belief system? As nice as it would be for all of us to agree on the answers to all those eternal questions religion seeks to answer, we don’t. So if we’re going to remain a fair and free society, we have only two options: Allow every religion to be represented in the Capitol rotunda — no matter how seemingly inappropriate and bizarre — or allow none.
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Anything else is really just an admission that you think your own religion should receive some sort of official government endorsement. And that, friends, is about as un-American as it gets.
As for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I may be starting a schismatic movement here, but I prefer to think of him as al dente and vegan, and a little lighter on the olive oil than some hell-bound so-called believers would care to acknowledge. Next year I may erect a competing monument to reflect that belief.
Or maybe, God help me, I’ll have better things to do.
You can’t spell ‘Scott Walker fails’ without ‘Scott Walker,’ Christmas 2013 edition
About a month ago, the Walker administration released data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the survey the administration rightly pointed to — during the contentious recall election — as the gold standard for assessing progress in job creation.
At the time, it was impossible to evaluate our progress compared to other states because the full report was not yet available — though one could guess, by reading between the lines, that Wisconsin was still a laggard.
Well, now we know exactly where we stand.
During the 12-month period ending in June, Wisconsin ranked 37th in the nation in private-sector job creation, down from 34th in the March 2012-March 2013 period. An even more worrying statistic may be this: Our rate of growth was just 1%, compared to the national rate of 1.9%. We also trailed five of our Midwestern neighbors — Michigan (2.8%), Minnesota (2.1%), Ohio and Iowa (1.5%), and Indiana (1.4%) — while tying Illinois.
Minnesota! The land of Christian Ponder and an overweening fondness for hockey hair! Noooo!
In light of those numbers, it’s worth revisiting this revealing New York Times op-ed by University of Minnesota prof Lawrence Jacobs. A Gopher! The shame!
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