JOIN MY NEW RELIGION AND RESTORE GOVERNOR CUOMO’S HEALTH REGULATIONS ON HOUSES OF WORSHIP
(A satire exposing the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Cuomo’s regulations designed to curb the spread of Covid)
JOIN MY NEW RELIGION AND RESTORE GOVERNOR CUOMO’S HEALTH REGULATIONS ON HOUSES OF WORSHIP
(A satire exposing the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Cuomo’s regulations designed to curb the spread of Covid)
By
David Gottfried
As you probably know, shortly before the clock struck twelve and Thanksgiving began, the United States Supreme Court struck down regulations, imposed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, which sought to limit the number of people who could crowd a church or synagogue. The Court said that Cuomo was wrongfully interfering with the free exercise of religion. Cuomo didn’t say you couldn’t pray. He didn’t even say you couldn’t pray in a Church. (Arguably, if G-d is the big enchilada they say he is, he could hear our prayers no matter where we are.) Cuomo merely wanted to place limitations on the number of people in a Church or synagogue.
However, Trump’s last nominee to the Court gives the right wing an insurmountable lock on the Supreme Court. The current Court holds that we should bow down to religious dogma and ritual as obediently as a Russian peasant bowing down to his Tzar.
We ought to give the Court and the right wing a taste of their own medicine. I have made up a religion that requires its adherents to harass people who won’t wear masks. Any attempt by government to curb our practice of harassment will constitute an unjust interference with the free exercise of our faith.
It isn’t hard to make up a religion. You can make them up by working from a familiar mold and its as simple as baking cookies.
My favorite mold is the Mother-Son faith. It’s a gripping human interest story that’s sure to enchant mama’s boys the world over. Without further adieu, this is my new faith:
In a New York City shelter, a homeless Puerto Rican woman gave birth to a son. Since she was unmarried, she got it into her head that the Father was G-d. And so baby Carlos, the son of G-d, was born.
Carlos was a brilliant baby. He started to propound church law when he was five months old. You think a talking 5 month old baby is too crazy for people to accept ? Hell, if the right wingers can convince their loony followers that Hillary uses the blood of dead babies to perform satanic rituals, any kind of groovy garbage is sane enough for the moronic American mind.
Carlos said that everybody had to wear masks because of the evil associated with the mouth. People often say evil things and the evil of their comments should be symbolically chastised by keeping their mouths masked at all times. (Baby God Carlos got this idea from another Baby G-d, Jesus)
At the same time, Carlos said that people should be naked from the neck down whenever possible. Carlos told us that since our bodies create life, our bodies are holy and should be revealed in their full naked glory. Toward this end, people who adhere to my faith have made as many buildings as well-heated as possible so all persons, upon entering a store, a mall, a government office or any other edifice, can promptly strip and check their clothes.
The evil mouth, and its evil biases had wrongly told us that we should cover and renounce our bodies. Because the evil mouth is responsible for the propagation of evil thoughts, the mouth must be punished and enclosed by a stern and unforgiving mask.
If you don’t wear a mask, you should be jeered, heckled and your satanic church services should be disrupted. We must go into their churches masked from the neck up and naked from the neck down to glorify the body that their evil churches demonize.
I suppose some people will say that the exercise of my faith will have to be curbed because it harasses others. However, such a notion is poppycock. We already allow religions to harass others.
For example, a few years ago, a few or several Jewish baby boys, in New York City, died of Herpes infections. They contracted the infection in a strange and grotesque fashion. Apparently, in their very small ultra orthodox sect, circumcisions were performed in a very peculiar way. After the mohel (the guy who conducts the circumcision) placed his knife to the boy’s penis, the mohel sucked a little bit of the boy’s blood. One of those mohels had herpes and he gave his herpes to the 8 day old boys he ritually knived. When an adult gets herpes simplex, he almost or never dies. However, an eight day old baby is a much weaker, frailer being and the slightest microbial onslaughts can be catastrophic.
As I recall, Mayor Bill De Blasio did virtually nothing. What had happened to these little boys was patent child abuse. But Bill De Blasio was afraid of a couple of rabbinical dinosaurs and their slavish followers who would vote in totalitarian lockstep. Essentially, the City of New York said that the doctrine of religious freedom was so incontestable and overwhelming that it trumped claims of child abuse. So if people can practice religion freely even when they abuse children, we, the followers of the mask religion, are free to heckle and harass people who don’t wear masks.
I left one thing out. I didn’t provide a rationale for covering up the nose as well as the mouth. But that shouldn’t be hard to take care of. A rule can always be placed on sound theocratic footing – all we need do is claim that G-d told us to follow the rule.