It's easy to shake our heads at Kathleen Folden's Christianist assault on Enique Chagoya's Jesus lithograph at the Loveland Museum.

...Because first of all, Kathleen, the print you attacked and tore to pieces did not show a man performing oral sex on Jesus. I know you heard that repeatedly from many sources, but saying something over and over again doesn't make it true.

What the print showed, Kathleen, is Jesus's head affixed to a fully-clothed woman's body, with a man knelling in front of her, licking her knee cap. The print did not depict – even to the most excitable and vigilant-to-experience-the-gratifying-pleasure-of-self-validating-offense of Christianist imaginations – a man performing fellatio on Jesus.

If you had bothered to look at the print, Kathleen – before raising your crowbar and screaming "How can you desecrate my Lord?" – you would have saved yourself a lot of trouble. You would have stuffed your crowbar back into your pants and maybe thought that, as long as you're at the Loveland Museum, you might have a look around. You would have then discovered the museum's period rooms, which show life in old-time Loveland. The rooms have been recently cleaned and refurbished and look particularly good right now. I'm sure you would have enjoyed them and perhaps reflected on the similarities and differences in life, at that time, between Loveland and your part of Montana.

But no. You drove the 960 miles from Kalispell, Montana to the Loveland Museum for the sole purpose of committing violence and destroying property. And that's what you did – in the name of your Christianist religion.

You are a terrorist.

•Like other terrorists, you scoffed at the objective descriptions of Enique Chagoya's print.

•Like other terrorists, you scoffed at the print's failure to meet the city of Loveland's community standards for labeling pornography.

•Like other terrorists, you scoffed at the administrative deliberations of the Loveland City Council and its decision to allow the print to remain on public view.

•Like other terrorists, you scoffed at the opportunity for peaceful protest – as, for example, exercised by the parishioners and clergy from St. John the Evangelist Catholic Parish.

•Like other terrorists, you scoffed at the possibility that your violence could harm others.

•Like other terrorists, you felt threatened by the most inconsequential of challenges to your fundamentalist beliefs.

•Like other terrorists, you sacrificed your personal welfare for a judgmental, self-righteous cause.

•Like other terrorists, you intended to dictate to the rest of us what we can see, how we can think and what we should believe. Otherwise, you'll come at us again with your crowbar.


Christianist bullying & terrorism ― Enique Chagoya at Loveland Museum ― Depictions of Jesus