But somehow, if a public school decides to put on a play mocking God and the Old Testament, that is not a church-state violation. The separation police don't want religious (or atheist) minorities to face religious indoctrination in a public school. But anti-religious indoctrination mocking the Judeo-Christian majority is a glorious festival of free speech.
Take, for example, the taxpayer-funded Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. The school is in South Hadley, part of the same community of Northampton which was happily nicknamed "Lesbianville, USA" after the 2000 census showed more lesbians live there per capita than anywhere in the country. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has a house there.
Smack dab in the middle of the Lenten season, as many Christians prepare for Easter, the school scheduled performances of a play called "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told." Make no mistake: This is a deliberate, and intentionally vicious, attack on Christianity.
"Fabulous" was written by the gay Jewish playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick. In this deconstruction of the Bible, God first creates two gay couples, Adam and Steve and Mabel and Jane.
These four are expelled from Eden and end up on Noah's ark, where Steve invents infidelity by having an affair with a rhinoceros. (Since that is somehow not enough, the women are sexually paired with a rabbit and a pig.) When the ark lands, this gay quartet discovers a strange race of humans who describe the horror of procreation. "We're gay," Adam announces. "We don't have children. We have taste."
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The first act concludes with Adam and Steve being two of the wise men at the Nativity. The second scene opens in the current day, with a depiction of the birth of Jesus in a New York apartment with the "wise man" Steve now being HIV-positive and the lesbian Jane in the place of Mary, the Mother of God, who complains, "I'm not supposed to be pregnant, I'm a bulldyke!"
Mabel arranges to be married to Jane by a handicapped lesbian rabbi with a cable-access TV show. We're also "treated" to Santa Claus as an "exquisitely curdled fairy."
It's one thing for this Bible shredding play to be performed in a community theater by adults. It's another thing entirely for these to be acted out in a public school by teenagers.
For his part, Rudnick is quite clear he doesn't believe in God. (Shocker.) In the script's introduction, he writes, "I believe in what human beings can do when you give them fifty bucks to guy some cheap red polyester velvet. Some people need more, something with vengeance and commandments and jihads."
He approached the play with the notion "Certainly my version of biblical matters could be every bit as absurd as the King James take. Creation tales tend towards the delirious; trying to explain the cosmos inevitably leads to comedy."
The Left rebels against God, and then declare they are the open-minded, peaceful ones. Pat James, a lesbian who bought a bunch of tickets for each performance, insisted, "The Haydenville Congregational Church is supportive all the way. We are an open and affirming congregation."
Does Rudnick's play sound like something you could support as "affirming"? This is the point. They're not only insulting they're dishonest. They know that to traditional Jews and Christians, this is a double-middle-finger salute. It only "affirms" by mockery. Why not just say so?
Because they're hypocrites. Leftists, more the radical ones, have an Orwellian habit of describing themselves as "inclusive" and "welcoming," but they shriek intolerance for people they think are intolerant. They don't have the decency to wonder if productions like these are the polar opposite of "open and affirming." They reject decency itself.
Then there was the school's principal, Tom Goldman, who asked, "Is it the role of public school to facilitate an exchange of ideas on the themes explored in this particular play? This is an excellent question, with answers that I imagine will be debated in what I hope will be climate of civility and a desire to understand others' viewpoints."
This man has the backbone of a noodle.
So to create an "exchange of ideas," the first thing you do is leave a flaming bag of dung on someone's doorstep? The Left has a bad habit of calling something a mere "dialogue" when they are dictating their terms of surrender to the culture. The note about hoping for a "climate of civility" is especially ridiculous, since there is no civility in the product on stage.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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