When John Hagee put out that full-bore apology to the Catholics, it made me wonder what this country is coming to when even Texans can’t flame the Pope anymore. As a youth in West Texas I could hear the anti-Catholic rhetoric raining down like dirt storms from the pulpits, carpeting the sawdust-prairie Masonic halls like serpents at the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup, sweeping through high school gymnasia like tumbleweeds choked with dried-up cotton from the parched Cross Timbers. The Pope brought Death, and the Catholic Church was a conspiracy of black-robed marauders excreted from a debauched Europe. Did Hagee really say he doesn’t want to be “hurtful”? That the “Great Whore” remark was wrong? Perhaps he needs to rehire Doug Wead, the defrocked Bush religious advisor, currently toiling for billionaire cowpoke evangelist Kenneth Copeland, who, as our colleague Sarah Posner points out, was the ghost-writer for Hagee’s 1997 Chicken-Little epic Day of Deception. Let’s get somebody in there who knows how to Kick Vatican Hiney.

Albert, You Cad!

Why is it that anyone who writes about Albert Einstein, the scientist par excellence of the 20th century, ends up talking about God? Einstein didn’t talk about God, and his few pronouncements on the subject are conflicting, some of them apocryphal. The most often-cited Einstein quote was, “I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe,” but the context of that sentence was his rejection of randomness in quantum mechanics. You could take that sentence and just as easily paraphrase it as, “It doesn’t make sense to me that the organizing principles of the universe are random.” Nevertheless it’s been seized on by Christian fundamentalists as an Einsteinian defense of religion. Why would they need Einstein to defend religion? At any rate, that’s part of the reason a 1954 Einstein letter calling belief in God “childish superstition” is expected to bring up to $16,000 when it’s sold at auction this month in London. Had the fundies not made such a big deal about the “dice with the universe” quote, then this one wouldn’t matter either. While we’re on the subject, though, if you really wanna piss off an Einsteinian, no matter whether he’s religious or atheist, just mention the feminist claim that the Theory of Relativity was actually discovered by Einstein’s first wife and fellow student at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, Mileva Maric. Although this sounds ludicrous at first, quite a few letters have been produced in which Einstein refers to “our research,” and when he received the Nobel Prize in 1921, he gave all the money to Maric, even though they’d just gone through a bitter divorce two years earlier. Most of the evidence, it seems, is tending toward turning Einstein into a chauvinist atheist plagiarist, but then it’s all relative, isn’t it?

Know Your Polygamists

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Now we have degrees of cultishness among various polygamy sects, with the current contender for the champeenship being the House of Yahweh in Clyde, Texas, where, to give you some idea, the leader is a defrocked Abilene cop who changed his name to Yisrayl Hawkins, but was born with the name Buffalo Bill Hawkins. Among the allegations compiled by the Callahan County Sheriff’s Office are child labor, sexual abuse, bigamy, welfare fraud, injury to a child, and forcing people to change their last name to Hawkins. Actually that last one is not a crime, even in Callahan County, but in general these people sound like deluded End Times primitivists more akin to Holiness Pentecostals than to the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints they’re being compared to. And once again we have paranoid law enforcement. When the Sheriff got a warrant for Yisrayl Hawkins, he held it for three months, because he was afraid of a “Branch Davidian-style” confrontation that would lead to a firefight. Instead, they nabbed Hawkins when he was driving through town, and then a judge who was apparently just as paranoid as the cops set Hawkins’ bail at $10 million because Hawkins had used the following sentence in a sermon: “I’m not asking much out of you–I’m just asking that you be willing to die rather than leave this house.” The willingness to die for faith is–ahem, I’m surprised I have to explain this to any West Texas jurist–so basic to Christianity that no cleric in Christendom would disagree with it. It hardly constitutes grounds for a $10 million bail, and another judge later agreed, reducing the amount to $100,000. That would be a 10,000 percent reduction. These cases tend to turn on wild swings like that, akin to the wildness of their doctrine, which we won’t even go into here, except to mention the part about spraying the feet and hands with disinfectant before worship. That would line up with the Holiness Pentecostal diagnosis, but perhaps they’ve taken it to a new level: Purell Pentecostals?