The following examples illustrate how the Easter season was marked by anti-Christianity:
- On April 6, Chris Hardwick used his Easter Monday Comedy Central show, “@Midnight,” to make a joke about Jesus’ resurrection: “Jesus woke up from a nap and now all sins have been wiped clean to make room for even more heinous ones. Whatever you did doesn’t matter so you can go out and be a d*** for another 365 days.”
- On Easter Sunday, the anti-Christian organization, Freedom From Religion Foundation, placed an ad in the New York Times arguing that religious liberty laws promote “hate.”
- On Holy Saturday, the Washington Post re-ran a Sally Quinn interview with James Carroll wherein he branded the Church anti-Semitic; she became an atheist at age 13 and then evolved into a “non-religious” person, and he is a Catholic-bashing ex-priest.
- On Good Friday, David Letterman joked about the pope’s physical, saying his weight gain may be a function of “a little too many Communion wafers.”
- On Holy Thursday, Letterman made ten jokes about the pope’s physical; all the comments were attributed to the attending physician. The joke listed as #1 was: “I know you don’t use it, but I still have to take a look at it.”
The animus against Christianity that is routinely expressed by the entertainment industry and the media is not without serious effect. How else to explain why we did not celebrate religious liberty during Holy Week? Instead, the discussion centered on how religious liberty is the enemy.
