Every year as we approach Holy Week, a story appears in which it is alleged some misguided organization or other has just “cancelled Easter” by removing all official mention of it from their output. Concerned Christians and conservatives then move in to object, calling such measures yet another case of politically correct pandering to hair-trigger minority groups like Muslims or queers. Usually, the organization so targeted then denies having cancelled Easter at all, generally by picking up on a minor inaccuracy in initial reporting and thus arguing critics have been “misinformed,” a line happily repeated in wholly uncritical fashion by the largely anti-Christian mainstream media.
At this point, most initially irritated citizens simply take this media-dispersed denial for granted and move on. Yet those few hardy souls inclined to look into the matter further will often find that, while the denial of the organization concerned is technically correct, in actual spirit just such a cancellation of the religious element of the festival really has taken place after all.
A classic illustration occurred last Easter in Great Britain when, in a piece of quite literal gesture politics, it was reported that the U.K.’s leading chocolate manufacturer, Cadbury, had begun selling generic “Gesture Eggs” instead of “Easter Eggs” to the public, possibly to avoid offending Britain’s ever increasing number of Muslims. One of the country’s best-known religious pressure groups, Christian Concern, promptly accused Cadbury of trying to “erase the connection between Easter and eggs.” Cadbury then denied doing any such thing, pointing out their seasonal products “reference Easter very clearly on the packaging—sometimes multiple times,” making Christian Concern’s allegation “factually incorrect.”
The company’s public correction then allowed online fact-checking sites like America’s Snopes—once a reliable, nonpartisan, urban-myth-debunking site, now a biased left-leaning outlet more devoted toward exposing alleged right-wing “fake news”—to claim the whole story was false.
But was it all false? Not exactly. As Snopes’ “Context” heading above implies, while Cadbury themselves made no corporate attempts to relabel their chocolate “Gesture Eggs,” one national retail outlet, Freshstores Limited (who sometimes operate under licensed Cadbury branding), did try and do so, placing posters advertising such egg-regiously renamed items in certain of their outlets, perhaps to reassure potential Muslim customers they were all fully halal. Once the subsequent Christian outcry occurred, Freshstores quickly took them down. But this does not alter the fact they put them up in the first place!
Simply by focusing upon the single inaccuracy in some of the initial reporting—i.e., that the wrong company was widely blamed for trying to do this—the left-wingers, Islam-appeasers, and secularists in the mainstream media were able to imply that the whole story was just yet more false, hysterical, Christian scaremongering, there being no modern-day “War on Easter” being waged across the Western world at all these days.
But there is. Last year, another significant battle in this war even took place at the White House.
As we all know, Easter is a movable feast—and, in 2024, it happened to fall upon the modern, secular Holy Day of March 31, which is apparently now something called “Trans Day of Visibility” (TDOV), an occasion I was previously under the assumption occurred every single day of the year now anyway.
This provided the Joe Biden-era White House with a dilemma. Which sacred holiday to celebrate the most? Easter Sunday, the 2,000-plus-year-old main holy day of the entire Christian calendar, marking the occasion of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the promised salvation of humanity, or Trans Day of Visibility, a completely artificial “holiday” invented in 2009 by a group of cross-dressing deviants in order to senselessly politicize their niche sexual predilections and force them down the throats of everyone else?
One possible solution to the conundrum was adopted by the United Church of Christ, an obscure Protestant denomination of clear social justice bent, who decided to arbitrarily declare that at Easter every transsexual “need[s] a resurrection movement” just like Jesus, meaning that “Easter’s resurrection [of Christ] is a rainbow of queer joy and resistance.” According to one of the church’s sincerely deluded ministers, Rachael Ward (pronouns: they/them):
For TDOV this year, I’m reflecting on what it means for trans siblings to resurrect into their joy—right here, right now—on this earth. For trans siblings to no longer be tucked in a tomb [like Jesus following His crucifixion], forced to wear clothing that doesn’t share who they are through and through. No longer tucked in a tomb, forced to hide their names and pronouns for fear of being bullied. No longer tucked in a tomb, forced to adhere to legislation attempting to disembody the Imago Dei within them.
Surely Rachael meant Imago DEI there?
Furthermore, the minister continued, as “Transgender and non-binary individuals are beloved by God, created in the image of God, and deserving of dignity and equal protection under the law,” this meant that all true Christians had to lobby the Democrats then running Washington to give transsexuals further legal protections, by “urging Congress to pass the Transgender Bill of Rights and the Equality Act.”
Given then-President Biden’s actions that very same Easter, it seems to me there was no need for such trans-fawning legislation to be passed at all, as the transgender religion (for such it is) already had equal rights with the Christian religion in the eyes of the Biden administration anyway—indeed, in some ways it seemed to have more than equal rights.
