The Vision of Christ that thou does see Is my Visions Greatest Enemy.
William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel
As George Bush advances his program to subsidize religious charities, the Religious Right (which expects to feed at the bounteous Federal trough) will be encouraged to advance its theocratic agenda in other areas. We're seeing an example in Fort Wayne where nine residents have threatened to sue the IUPUI campus. Why? A theatre arts student there is trying to stage Terrence McNally's play Corpus Christi as his senior directing project.\nCorpus Christi has drawn attack since it was first staged. It's about a Texas kid named Joshua who's clearly a Christ-figure, and he's gay. Early productions of the play were picketed by Roman Catholics and attacked by various religious conservatives. None of them had apparently read the play, not even the Church officials who encouraged the laity to protest. It's a safe bet that none of the objectors to the Fort Wayne production have read it either.\nI have read Corpus Christi, by the way. It's not very good, in my opinion. Far too reverent, but then the playwright is a Christian -- as is the gay Republican theatre arts major who's staging the play in Fort Wayne. More importantly, I found it boring, but then I find most of McNally's plays boring.\nThe people who are making the fuss appear to be the same sort of people who want prayer in public schools and other public institutions -- the same sort of people who want religious groups to be able to use public school buildings for meetings. Now they're letting it be known that they also want to monitor and control the religious views that are expressed publicly, based on what pleases or offends them. It's a dangerous precedent, but no one should be surprised that right-wing Christians want to set it, because under Bush they can safely assume that they will be the censors who monitor and control other people's beliefs.\nThe most revealing remark was made by one of the plaintiffs: "What they're saying to me is that Jesus Christ, my Jesus Christ, is a homosexual. And I don't believe that."\nDoes this woman realize what a can of worms she's trying to open?\nI have an old friend who grew up in a reactionary Christian milieu. He now gets irate over depictions of Christian apocalypticism -- the belief, popularized by such Christian works as The Late Great Planet Earth, that Jesus will return in the next few years. Should he mount a lawsuit over religious broadcasts which express this view?\nIn any case, "they" (whoever "they" are) are not saying that this woman's Jesus Christ is a homosexual. The play Corpus Christi says nothing about her Jesus Christ, who is probably an anti-gay bigot like herself.\nIf Christians are allowed to enforce their personal visions of Jesus by the power of the state, we can expect religious warfare, the sort of conflict that the First Amendment is supposed to prevent. Of course, that's what they want, since the Religious Right believes that waging war on other religions is their sacred duty. Remember that religious bigots also attacked Martin Scorsese's boring and reverential film The Last Temptation of Christ, a commercial project that received no government funding. And why did they object to it?\nBecause it depicted Jesus as a heterosexual. No doubt the Fort Wayne plaintiffs will be satisfied if they manage merely to harass the kid trying to stage Corpus Christi, and frighten controversy-hating University officials so that they'll quash any future artistic endeavors that might annoy certain sorts of Christians.\nThat doesn't mean, of course, that these people don't want religious art to appear on state university campuses. The next lawsuit will probably be to support an evangelical student who wants to exhibit a painting depicting Jesus wielding a flaming sword. That militarist image is controversial (though Biblical), and some Christians object to "their" Jesus being shown as a killer. But the Religious Right doesn't care what other Christians think.\nBoth read the Bible day & night.\nBut thou readst black where I read white.
