And here we thought only Grinches were responsible.

Sure, all you atheists, agnostics, pagans, witches, druids, lapsed Catholics, heathens, socialists, pinkos, and secular humanists may be able to rise above your differences and celebrate what’s essentially become a non-denominational family ritual each year without losing your shit, but in doing so, aren’t you really just victimizing the faithful few who understand the true meaning of Christmas in a way that your unsaved souls could never hope to comprehend?

Aren’t you?

Witness as Jon Stewart warm-heartedly reveals the actual mission statement behind Fox News: convincing white, Republican Christians that the world is out to get them by acknowledging that other people exist.

Oh, Gretchen Carlson — where has your education from Stanford University and Oxford gone? It’s not in your job description.

If you didn’t catch last night’s knee-slappingly hilarious Televangelist Infidelity Matrix segment on Rachel Maddow, do yourself and watch it now.

It all culminates with the batshit mea culpa from Daystar televangelist Marcus Lamb, who dragged not only the wife but his marriage counselor before the cameras in order to cut an extortion attempt — regarding his “emotional relationship” with another women — off at the pass.

Experience the power of faith as the involved parties hold hands, pat themselves on the back for saving 8 million dollars by sharing their plight, cast themselves as courageous martyrs, chastise the wicked blackmailers, let Satan off the hook, and smile like your drunk-ass mom at Christmas.

Why is Lamb just a good man who lost his way and is now finding the path back to the light?

Take a memo:

“He had one inappropriate period of misbehavior, with one person and it wasn’t a man,” the couple’s marriage counselor and close friend Fred Kendall said. “It wasn’t a transvestite. It was with a woman; a Christian woman.”

It’s the new standard in delusional, hypocritical Christian self-mitigation.

Hat tip to Joe My God.

Watch in fucking amazement! as a lone child systematically assuages all your unsaved Humanist doubts about the Hereafter. See! extremely blonde Gretchen Carlson succumb to her go-to operating mode: wide-eyed “Oh Gosh! Won’t That Be The Day!” astonishment tempered with smarmy, lip-glossed abashment. Hear! a young boy relate his near-death ingress into the Kingdom of God with about as much wonder as it takes to survive an inconvenient nosebleed. Behold! as he describes the Chick Tract-inspired face of Jesus thanks to cue cards located conveniently to his right off-camera. Hurl! as he discloses clandestine family knowledge that could just have easily been gleaned through casual observation, snooping, or gentle coaching! Void your bowels! at the sight of a father ensnaring his child in a transparent pretext for cash and face time.

Coincidentally, I can personally attest that Oz is 100% for realz because I went there last Friday by way not of botched surgery, but with a bottle of Smirnoff Pomegranate Martini on an empty stomach.

The grasses smelled of spearmint, and the trees were ripe with lunchboxes.

Hat tip to The Stranger.

“Susie, do you know anything about… witches?”

— Suspiria

I never particularly cared all that much for the conventional hatchet-faced hag image of the witch; magic is seductive and bewildering, and I have to figure that any sensible or ambitious woman with magic at her disposal would glamor herself up (a feat Roald Dahl‘s nasty lezzie witches never managed). Certainly the main reason why witchcraft is such a transgression for the pious peasantry is because it enables the subversion of God’s order. Nothing was more sinful for the Puritans than the thought of a lovely young thang taking off all her clothes, flying into the night, and cavorting with demons who granted her strange abilities. Except when elderly, homely ladies did the same thing.

In opium-dazed visions, the famed hophead author Thomas De Quincey beheld three terrible sisters — dread Witch Queens whom he took as the incarnations of earthly despair. That phantasmagoric encounter would later become the basis for Italian director Dario Argento‘s superb “Three Mothers” trilogy beginning with Suspiria in the late ’70s, chronicling the exploits of the sisters as they sowed the seeds of Terror, Death, and Sorrow over the world. The youngest sister — the most fearsome and cruel of the lot — was also the most beautiful. (read the full article)

“You never meet anybody that thinks they’re a bad person” concluded the titular murderer from The Talented Mr. Ripley, and that sick bitch was right on.

There’s an inherent psychological fail-safe in the human condition that allows us to convince ourselves that we’re not irredeemable monsters; serial killers find Jesus in the clink, politicians trot their wives and kids out on stage after they get caught tomcatting, religious people only make “mistakes” and actors surround themselves with yes men who tell them what they want to hear. Exceedingly rare are the instances in which you’ll encounter anyone who’ll freely admit to being an unmitigated asshole.

Dante’s vision of Hell with its descending tiers has always fascinated me because its final levels are reserved not for gays, wayward women, or even murderers, but for hypocrites and traitors. Murder and rape are certainly nadirs, but I’ve personally always regarded the treacherous — those who’ll sell out a friend or betray a confidence for personal gain — as the lowest lot, and Uncle Toms are both, so while I can’t say I have any abiding belief in an Afterlife (or, for that matter, even in Karma), it’s pleasing to imagine that a traitor’s crimes will follow him even after death. Betrayal is one of the worst human motivations, and when it’s directed at one or many of your own, it’s a snidely iniquity. (read the full article)

Our favorite kind of bigots — the friendly, condescending, “hate the sin” type — are here for us, and even though one of them menstruates (“Unclean! Out of my tent!”) and the other clearly wasn’t born in the true God’s image (A god who isn’t downy white?! What’s next — lady gods?!), they know something we don’t:

Jesus is comin’ back! (read the full article)

Under God.

Two innocuous enough words that lie at the heart of all the traditionalist handwringing, conspiracy-mongering, speaking-in-tongues mania that claws and grasps with venal avarice in an attempt to drag us all back to the ’50s, the ’80s, the ’90s — anytime before Fu Manchu stole the presidency and began plotting to take out the Heartland with his Ice Ray.

I’m not much of a joiner, and I guess that’s what’s kept me from ever bothering to park my ass in a pew to listen glaze-eyedly to an assortment of arcane prophecy and lame parable. I don’t care who begat whom. Just the terminology regularly employed to evoke faith says it all: “flock,” “follow,” “sheep,” “serve,” “Lord,” “surrender.” All that comes to mind is a medieval fiefdom wherein the serfs toil in numbed fealty for a king who dwells in a castle on the hill with an order of priests and politicians as his boot-licking vassals.

Sure, the Church essentially exists to convince the proletariat to accept its lowly earthly lot while taking its money, and Satan is little more than an obscure Biblical reference seized upon by the Elders to be deployed as the world’s most effective scare tactic, but whatev. There are monsters, there are angels… (read the full article)

Yes, Focus on The Family’s ostensible mission statement is the strident defense of every homespun convention that can be invoked under the name of Jesus, Santa Claus, or Uncle Sam, but we all know what the watchdog group’s true raison d’être is: condemning smut while teeth-gnashingly wallowing in it and convincing its members they’re above it all.

This vintage F.O.F. seminar on porn addiction is hysterical on multiple levels: the wonderfully trashy Ho Stroll opening montage, the assertion that the strategy behind our hugely successful War on Drugs should be applied to combating porno cartels, James Dobson‘s hilarious “The fags and the dykes, and every kind of perversion!” rhetoric that sounds lifted right out of Myra Breckinridge, and best of all, the most over-the-top drink-the-Kool-Aid audience reactions ever.

I once went to a funeral for a family friend that almost immediately descended into an interminable hour-and-a-half-long Evangelical sermon on the dangers of pornography in which the deceased was barely even incidental. Watching this brought back the same avoid-the-groupthink phrase I kept repeating over and over in my head to keep me sane:

Not a looker among ‘em.

Hat tip to Found Footage Festival.

You have only to regularly tune in for The Soup to be hip to the fact that The Secret Life of The American Teenager is easily the worst scripted drama on basic cable, and arguably, in the entire network landscape. Overwrought, plastic, insipid, and reactionary, the series clumsily cobbles together every paralyzing phobia about sex, and is apparently written by a group of middle-aged Evangelical virgins who still cry while masturbating in the dark.

You see, sex in this jejune little corner of suburban hell is not a natural act that carries with it certain practical ramifications requiring it to adapt to a modern world wherein humans don’t have to be in constant states of reproduction because they’re no longer subject to the whims of weather, plague, and predators. Rather it’s a form of spiritual trespass that incurs dire consequences through all manner of corporal castigation — just like The Entity, minus the invisible rape and blue lightning!

So, pregnancy is God’s way of punishing you for being a whore by shackling you with a precious bundle of joy, and should you avoid baby stigma through the use of contraception or sheer chance, you will also receive retribution in the form of a dead parent whose demise is apparently directly attributable to your climax.

And that makes you a murdering tramp whose guilt cannot be alleviated! Ever! (read the full article)