After being defeated but claiming victory anyway in his anemic two-year boycott of Ford [1], Donny Wildmon of Tupelo is now leading his American Family Association into a new crusade against Marriott hotels [2], hoping he can pressure the Mormon board into eliminating pay-per-view adult movies from its 3,000 properties in 68 countries. Good luck, Donny. The Mormons have never had any problem with other people’s sin, they were the original Las Vegas land barons.

Would It Be a Hate Crime to Shoot This Guy?

Of all the people who make their living by being Biblically-based crackpots for the media, the Reverend Ted Pike of Clackamas, Oregon, occupies a special place as the proponent of the idea that the government is trying to make Christianity a hate crime [3]. (Yes, that’s what I said.) He’s been riding this holy horse for about four years now, and here’s how the argument goes: The “evil Jews” who run the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith have succeeded in getting anti-Semitism classified as a hate crime in 45 states and have tried four times to get federal hate-crimes laws passed. (Pike takes credit for defeating them all four times.) As a result, any Christian who believes Christ was crucified by Jews can be imprisoned for stating that belief. In fact, according to a recent report by the “Office of Global Anti-Semitism” of the U.S. State Department, saying Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus is “classical anti-Semitism” (which has been defined by the courts as a crime), which means the U.S. government is trying to make being Christian a crime. There are so many things wrong with this idea—the basis of Pike’s books, videos, website, radio shows, and God only knows what other money-making ventures—that I think it’s hardly necessary to point them all out, but I’ll just note that there is no “Office of Global Anti-Semitism.” What Pike is referring to is a report on anti-semitism around the world that was requested by Congress and for which the State Department has a special envoy, also required by Congress. The envoy is solely concerned with anti-semitism in other countries! Why? Because we have Jewish Americans traveling abroad! I should also note that all hate-crimes laws involve the commission of an actual crime, not just saying “I hate you.” Even if Pike’s fairy tale were true, and stating that Jews killed Jesus was considered anti-semitic, you would need to be stabbing the person you were speaking to before it would become a crime. Finally, the current special envoy, Gregg Rickman, was appointed by Condoleezza Rice at the behest of that Jesus freak, George Bush.

Robin Hood Had Cooler Threads, Too

Catholic priest Robert Ascolese, better known as “Father Bob,” was rigging the fund-raising raffles at St. Joseph’s Church in Washington, New Jersey, so that all the “winners” were always out-of-towners like “Ezekiel Fleming” and “Arlene Bishop” and eventually a cool million dollars was embezzled [4] from the scam. His parishioners are all defending him, though, because he was not enriching himself, but putting the money back into the church and school, like Robin Hood. The problem is, the tickets in his “Powerball” raffles went for a hundred bucks each. Now somebody might donate twenty bucks at a time to the church and the school, but the number of Ben Franklins you’re willing to peel off to support the church is probably enhanced quite a bit by the knowledge that you could possibly win some five-figure jackpots if you’re lucky. The Warren County prosecutor is inclined to be lenient with Father Bob, who is not remorseful at all. A local TV reporter reminded him of the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.” Father Bob shot back, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!” Yeah, Bob, okay, I think Jesus is supposed to decide when to say that.

Jews Too Hip To Be Jewish?

I’ve never understood Kabbalah, and after reading Daphne Merkin’s 18-month odyssey [5] through the intricacies of the new Madonna-approved version as taught at the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, I still don’t. But I did learn a few things, like the fact that the American movement was started by Philip and Karen Berg of Queens in the early nineties, that they deny any association with Judaism even though they have private meetings to parse ancient rabbinical texts, that they teach a form of prosperity gospel in the sense that they try to get members to constantly “give till it hurts,” that they don’t reveal how much money they take in or what they do with it, that there is an inner circle of initiates (about 200 people) who make most of the rules, that Madonna is indeed their number-one benefactor, that they believe in reincarnation and astrology, and that they probably have very little relation to the followers of the ancient Zohar, their master text. Madonna’s teacher, by the way, is Eitan Yardeni, the spiritual director of the London Kabbalah Center, whose previous career was teaching Israeli airmen how to launch Hawk missiles. “We’re much bigger than Jewish,” he told Merkin. “We’re here to touch souls all over the world, to give people universal tools to access the practical.” Okay, well, stop firing those Hawk missiles, that’s not a universal tool, is it?