I am a first-year law student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. You may know us from our football team. (No, I still don't want to talk about the Arkansas game.) But what you may not know about Louisiana's capital is that this place is full to the brim with unmitigated right-wing christofascist whackjobs of the first degree. Follow me below the jump for the ridiculous pseudo-controversy that's drawn me away from my studies and into the company of people who understand...
LSU is a big school. There are upwards of 30,000 students here, and needless to say, we come from all over the world. It's a gigantic research university with a law school, a veterinary medicine program, and tons of academic programs. Believe it or not, some of us care about more than whether our coach is going to Michigan or staying here. (For those who care, he's staying.)
Since the student body is so diverse, when the university decided to have a holiday celebration, they erected a 50-foot fir tree in the center of campus. They called it the holiday tree, since the multi-tradition celebration was going to take place there. There would be Christmas carols, a menorah for Chanukah, and a Kwanzaa celebration. Fun for the whole campus in 2007. Imagine that.
Well, the local megachurch crazies heard tell of this, and you should've seen the foolishness. By the end of the afternoon in question, the local newspaper's Web site had the following push poll up: "Should LSU take Christmas away?" Tons of hysterical "OMG, the left-wing secular Christian-hating [insert anti-GLBT slur here]s are trying to kill the baby Jesus and convert us all to witchcraft!!!" blather followed on the local TV news. They flooded the university with phone calls, e-mails and protesters. Finally, LSU caved and called it a Christmas tree. The jubilant, O'Reilly-esque proclamation from the old white man who reads the news here: "It's Christmas again at LSU, and YOU made it happen!"
Seriously, I don't know what affliction has taken hold here, but it is BAD. I grew up in the Bible belt, over in Mobile, but my God, I've never in my life lived in a place as dominated by fundie foolishness as Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I guess my first clue that I wasn't in a thinking part of the country was when I first drove here in the summer and pulled off I-10 to go apartment hunting. Right there by the Interstate, in plain sight of basically anyone in a three-mile radius, stand three crosses that are at least 100 feet tall, illuminated at night in case you missed them.
I just wanted to get a law degree, and this is what I have to deal with. Thanks for listening to my rant. Will it EVER end?