Dan Savage Wanted Sarah Palin to Choke on Her Christmas Pastry

You’ll have to forgive the delay on this item, but perhaps it was best to get a polite distance from the Christmas season before we review how “War on Christmas” books make some liberals lose their marbles.

On December 18 at his usual Internet haunt, TheStranger.com, Dan Savage posted his failed attempt to review Sarah Palin’s book “Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.” He didn’t actually read it. His anger management issues were too strong, and he reported he kept flinging the book across the room. (Warning: graphic language and hate speech ahead). 

There are lots of Americans out there whose religious holidays aren't also national holidays. The country doesn't shut down—and public spaces aren't turned into temples—on Yom Kippur or Diwali or Naw-Ruz. Now, either Jews, Hindus, and Zoroastrians are made of stronger stuff than Sarah Palin... or Sarah Palin is a shit-talking pimp who makes money playing to the carefully cultivated persecution complexes of conservative Christian rubes who wouldn't know what religious persecution was if it sat on their faces and shit in their mouths. (Maybe that's not an either/or.)

And if I may: Gay people have been persecuted for years, for centuries, for motherfucking millennia. Really persecuted, primarily by people of faith. And our persecution didn't take the form of straight people wishing us well but failing to use precisely the right phrase. No, we were burned at the stake, arrested, imprisoned, committed, lobotomized, thrown out of our homes, and fired from our jobs; our children were taken from us, our partners were barred from our hospital rooms during medical emergencies, and on and on and on. And yet... somehow... the joy of giving and receiving blowjobs wasn't drained from our minds and hearts.

If centuries of persecution didn't ruin blowjobs for gay people, Sarah, "happy holidays" isn't going to destroy anyone's Christmas...

Not that there is now, or ever was, a war on Christmas. But that saying "merry Christmas" is an asshole move. Just as conservatives made patriotism toxic during the Vietnam War by conflating it with blind obedience to authority ("My country, right or wrong!"), modern conservatives have made "merry Christmas" toxic by associating it with Christian fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and the politics of imagined persecution.

Unfortunately, the war on Christmas is a game Palin and O'Reilly and Fox News and the Family Research Council can't lose. The more they complain about people saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas," the fewer people will say "merry Christmas." This will be held up as proof that the war on Christmas is real. But people like me aren't replacing "merry Christmas" with "happy holidays" to be "politically correct," as Palin insists in the introduction to her stupid book, we're doing it because we don't want people to think we're assholes.

So happy fucking holidays to you, Sarah. I hope you choke on a cinnamon bun.