 "Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War against Christianity", by David Limbaugh. Regnery Publishing, 2003 Let's start by having you read a typical passage from the book under review. As you read, consider this question: what sort of reader would find 400 pages of this sort of thing entertaining? And be of good cheer; the ordeal will soon be over. Now, read: "Under the [released time student prayer] program in the Pomona Unified School District in Pomona, California, students are released from school one hour per week to attend classes on religious instruction off campus. Recently, anti-Christian sentiment has reared its head, apparently making some in the school district feel the need to publicly discourage the program. For ten years the Pomona district allowed teachers to distribute permission slips for the program to students. But in 2002, the district reversed itself, specifically forbidding teachers from making permission slips available and forbidding students from passing them out to other students. 'It is outrageous,' observed attorney Brad Dacus, for a school district to trounce upon [sic] the ability of elementary school children to invite their peers to attend something that is very dear to them. Such policies only further the anti-religious stigma often created by public schools.' There is no constitutional excuse for the district's behavior. As Dacus notes, 'The mere providing of permission slips for possible activities of outside organizations in no way connotes an endorsement of those organizations, but merely is an administrative necessity for allowing outside activities and outside organizations to make contact with parents.'" Did you have a hard time reading to the end of the passage? Did it strike you as annoyingly trivial and petulant? If so, be grateful. Your reaction is typical of living human beings.
If, on the other hand, you read the passage with interest, please check your skin for suppurating pus and see if you have a pulse. You may be one of the living dead. The book is called Persecution, and its author is David Limbaugh. Yes, that's right: Limbaugh. As in the little brother of Rush, America's best-loved junkie. As a living human, you may wonder why you should have to read such deathly prose. The short answer is: survival. To defeat the zombies, we must understand the zombies. And the safest way to visit their world is to dissect books like this, which make up typical zombie light reading. But there is another reason. For me, at least, buying and reading every single one of these 400 pages was an act of atonement. You see, I feel responsible, in a small way, for the rise of the zombies, because I never took their bible-bashing rants seriously, back when there was still time to oppose them.In fact -- it shames me to admit this -- I actually took the Christians' side at Berkeley. It just seemed unsporting to attack people as mentally backward as Pentecostals. Working out on them was like hanging up limbless cripples to use as heavy bags. So, like a true nerd, I spent scarce reserves of courage defending them against the hippies, commies and freelance crazies on Sproul Plaza. It was a typical quixotic gesture: too timid to buy a can of coke except from vending machines, I threw myself into screaming matches in defense of Evangelical bigots who not so long ago delighted in burning my ancestors' convents and hanging our priests. There was another, even dumber reason I took their side: the God-botherers were pro-American, and so was I--probably the only actual nationalist intellectual within a mile of the Campanile at that time. Stupid, stupid, stupid...well, all I can do now is study the living dead, like the weary scientists who work with Bud the Zombie in Day of the Dead, Romero's last and most heartbreaking zombie allegory.
Pages:
Previous 1 234 Next
Print Share article
|
