TEDDY BEARS

Every faith has them, these rigid doctrinaires who would sacrifice their very humanity for the fool’s gold of theological purity, these people so eager to live the literal law of their holy books that they miss the point of those holy books, shedding compassion, kindness and plain common sense along the way.

Worse, they are always literal about the wrong things, always literal about passages in holy writ that they feel empower them to punish, judge, ostracize and condemn. Never literal about the passages that require them to give, forgive, serve and stand humble.

And then there is Darfur, the western region where four years of government-backed genocide has left an estimated 200,000 people dead. Some might say they are the lucky ones. Luckier than the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet. Luckier than the people burned alive inside their huts. Luckier than the women raped so brutally they can no longer walk, so brutally that urine trickles constantly down their legs.

What a pious, holy nation. Their God is offended by a teddy bear.

If anything, God is offended by them.

Excerpt from an article written by Leonard Pitts, Jr. for the Miami Herald. Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004 Fundamentalists threatened by a teddy bear – 12/05/2007 – MiamiHerald.com