THE NEXT TIME some Republican-fascist in Congress or in the media starts talking "cancel culture" remember this:
A painting of Jesus and his mother, Mary, in which Jesus is seen by many to be painted in the likeness of George Floyd in response to his agonizing death, was stolen from Catholic University of America Columbus Law School last week after a spate of conservative media attention and death threats directed at the artist.
"Mama," by St. Louis artist Kelly Latimore, shows a Black Virgin Mary cradling Jesus' dead body after his crucifixion in a style known as a pietà. It was discovered missing the morning of Nov. 24 from its place outside the Washington law school's Mary Mirror of Justice Chapel. School officials have since replaced it with a smaller version.
Latimore said his depiction has drawn criticism ever since he created it last year, but things escalated last week after the Daily Signal, a website owned by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, published a story about the painting Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 23). An online petition, purportedly written by CUA students, advocating for the painting's removal began circulating as well and accrued more than 3,600 signatures.
Meanwhile, Latimore told Religion News Service, death threats against him have increased.
"I think, unfortunately, racism is part of a lot of it, especially death threats [that include] derogatory remarks about George Floyd specifically," he said, adding that some of the threats took issue with any depiction of Jesus as Black.
It's funny, just last night I was talking to someone about my mother's distaste for the Renaissance-Baroque style ceramic Aryan Holy Family depiction of the manger scene, she preferred the one someone gave her in which they are depicted as indigenous Peruvians or the one she got from Egypt that is carved from wood in which the figures have no particular ethnicity.
One of the things to notice about this is that the petition at change.org (irony #1) posted there by "CUA Young Americans For Freedom" (ironies #2, Catholics who are anything but Catholic but white supremacists and #3 "for Freedom"), These young allegedly university-based racists are calling for the suppression of a solidly Scripture based depiction of Jesus as the least among us as being a valid representative of The Lord - a Black Person totally subdued being murdered excruciatingly by police is about as least as you can get in the United States - as they claim they are champions of freedom.
When "freedom" turns into a fetish and a meaningless slogan, when "Catholic" and "Christianity" do the results will never be good, they won't be Christian, they won't result in freedom. In the United States, among the vulgar materialists who are the Republican-fascists, those who are "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" none of those words have any valid meaning but are lies covering up what they really want, white supremacist oligarchy and violent oppression. They certainly are in favor of what the police-murderers did to George Floyd.
All depictions of Jesus and Mary and Joseph as clean, middle-class white dummies should be suspect for a good long time from here on. As should those who claim they are champions of "freedom" and "Catholicism" and "Christianity" Suspect until they show by what they do for the least among us that they aren't about white supremacy and Republican-fascism on behalf of the richest among us.
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