Except For Christians . . . Public Displays Of Religion OK
By REY FLORES
“L.A. neighborhood stunned by sledgehammer attacks on Buddha statue. ‘We’re not going to let this hateful activity win’” — Los Angeles Times headline from July 11, 2017.
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A few columns back, I wrote about the gentleman who drove his car into a recently erected monument of the Ten Commandments in Little Rock, Ark. While this episode did make some minor headlines, the nation was neither as shocked nor as vocal about it, compared to the Buddha incident.
It appears that attacks on Christianity and Christian symbols, especially on any public property, are seen with a collective apathy and disregard. It’s just liberal business as usual.
However, when a Buddha statue was recently clobbered by some nut with a sledgehammer, the Los Angeles Times ran to the top of their building to holler all about it, climbing faster than you can say King Kong.
It reminds me of how “tolerant” America is about all faiths except Christianity, particularly Catholicism.
My lapsed Catholic sister once bought a Buddha statue at Target to adorn her hipster apartment in Chicago. I guess that isn’t a huge surprise coming from a retailer obsessed with allowing drag queens to use the women’s restroom.
Can you imagine Target selling a rosary or a crucifix?
Apparently, the sledgehammer was wielded by some crazy guy who was babbling on about al-Qaeda and Muslim extremism. If you’re going to be a religious bigot, at least get your symbols, symbolisms, and deities correct so you don’t look like a total ignoramus.
The Buddha statue was anonymously placed at a traffic island in the Palms community in west Los Angeles, where, for some crazy reason, people dumped discarded furniture and appliances to the point that the city had to pick up the junk almost daily. It had become not only unsightly, but a traffic hazard as well.
After the first statue was destroyed, it was then shortly replaced with a reinforced head. That didn’t stop Mr. Sledgehammer. It took him several efforts and a couple of statues to do the damage he was determined to get done.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Lee Wallach, director of the Motor Avenue Improvement Association, said that there is an effort to raise $5,000 to buy a new Buddha statue made of metal, plus they want to add a rock garden and video cameras to prevent any future vandalism.
I’m trying hard to imagine any municipality being so bent out of shape over the vandalism, had it been a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary instead. I find it even harder to imagine a similar community being so “stunned,” if at all, to the point of going out of their way to replace a statue had it been a Catholic statue.
Fifth District Councilmember Paul Koretz (they call them “councilmembers” there in order not to offend gender-neutral nut jobs, or radical anti-male feminists), has literally taken this whole street Buddha thing as his pet cause. He has been photographed several times now, petting the Buddha statue on the head. It’s great to see our tax dollars at work to pay guys like Koretz who has nothing better to do than to pet Buddha statues in front of fake news cameras.
I thought that the liberal, feel-good, politically correct progressive fascists were all about separating religion from public property. I thought that they felt that it was a form of proselytizing. I guess that only applies to Christian symbols.
Coincidentally enough, this happened at about the same time the town council members of Belle Plaine, Minn., decided to disallow all religious symbols from their Veterans Memorial Park. In the spring, the town council had voted to allow an open forum zone because of protests against the park’s lone statue of a veteran there that included a cross. Soon, the Satanic Temple made plans to install a symbol in that zone.
Prior to a mid-July protest rally against the Satanic symbol, the family of the creator of the veteran statue suddenly removed it from the park. Then, according to July 21 media reports, the Belle Plaine city council voted to end the park’s “open forum” area that allowed religious statues.
This move prevents the veteran statue from returning to the park and it also prevents the Satanic figure from arriving in the first place.
The would-have-been Satanic monument is an unimaginative ugly black cube featuring pentagrams on all four sides and an upside-down army helmet on top. A complete eyesore.
While the Satanic cultists said that the monument paid tribute to veterans who were Satanists, the real reason is that these people are nothing short of being agitators who simply want to offend our Christian citizens.
I also want to point out the fact that we never see anyone but Christians protesting anything satanic like this. Where are the rest of the world religions when it comes to fighting offensive, and stupid, Satanic garbage like this?
One fine example of this is when in 2015, over 50 Christians protested the ridiculous nine-foot bronze Baphomet statue unveiled in Detroit, after the same idiots at The Satanic Temple failed to have it permanently installed in place next to a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma.
Michigan is a hotbed of Muslim activism, but not one of them showed up at that protest. Why? It reminds me of the classic Edmund Burke quote: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Lastly, with President Donald J. Trump’s most recently proposed ban on “transgenders” in the military, I wondered what religions could be practiced by our troops.
Of 221 religions recognized by the military, included are Druids, Pagans, Shamans, Magick and Spiritualists, Wicca, and another bunch of variations of Pagans and Wiccans. Most recently added were Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, Deists, No Religion.
After the Obama administration, I was quite surprised Satanists were not on this list. Let’s keep it that way.
As for public displays of Catholicism, please keep placing those Virgin Mary and St. Francis statues in your front yards, and keep hanging those rosaries off your rear-view mirrors.
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker and is available to speak at your next event. Contact Rey at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
