Well this is a fine little dust up

Yesterday, PZ Myers, of pharyngula fame, pointed to a silly little story of alleged Eucharist desecration and the death threats (yes, that's right I said DEATH THREATS) that the wafer smuggler received after taking the cracker. PZ expressed a desire in his post to obtain the holy tasteless bread to perform some symbolic desecration. Well this got the ire of Captain Catholic himself, Bill Donahue, who now is, of course, calling for PZ Myers job as pennace for so foul an act as doing horrible things to a cracker.

Donahue is the epitome of a serial religious grievence monger. His organization is no different than CAIR, they just hold different myths sacred. Of course it is rank insanity to get huffy over a freakin cracker. Heck, the Catholic church let serial child molestation by its own clergy continue unabated for decades. A little inappropriate cracker touching would seem a minor offense. But irony has never been a strong suit for the relgious mind.

Well this little dust up has landed over at Nation Review Online's The Corner and the results are mixed. Katherine Lopez started it by merely reprinting Donahue's press release. But the response from the peanuts wasn't universal outrage. Andrew Stuttaford pointed out the obvious free speech issues while John Derbyshire reflected on PZ's discussion about piety and intelligence. But the most interesting passage was a letter reprinted by Jonah Goldberg from a reader. From the letter:

I understand that your heart is in the right place here, but the analogy is completely inadequate. We Christians are quite accustomed to have our _images_ treated scornfully, in a way that the Academy would never tolerate for images of politically correct heroes. But the Eucharist is not an image: it is, in the teaching of the Church, the Body of Christ itself. People have died rather than obey their captors' command to desecrate the Eucharist. To a believer, there is simply no analogy between the Eucharist and mere objects, any more than there is between a person and a photograph of a person.

This I find most interesting. If this were indeed the body of a human being, then Catholics around the world are guilty of cannabalism. Whoa whoa whoa!! you say. That's just going too far! Is it really? People like Bill Donahue are demanding that we take their religious views and traditions with respect. He damands it to an extreme that he believes a public University should FIRE a professor for merely suggesting that he would like to"desecrate" a cracker. I'd say that's pretty serious. And as the emailer suggested, Catholics believe that that cracker is the LITERAL body of Christ. It would seem we have no choice but to start rounding up Catholics as they leave the sacrament line. The Catholic League would surely roundly denounce the authorities for, you guessed it, taking their religion seriously.

I don't know how much clearer the goal of an organization like the Catholic League could be. They pine for the warm wooden box of theocracy to bury individual liberty in. Donahue wants the University of Minnesota Morris to destroy the livelihood of an individual over his opinions of a stupid cracker. And make no mistake about it, if Donahue had his way and didn't live in a secular democracy, PZ would have to worry about much more than his job.