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" I have several reasons why I wish occasionally that Easter Sunday landed on a Wednesday. If it landed on a Wednesday, then we would all be spared the molasses-flood of pundit piety that&amp;#039;s going to break loose tomorrow on the usual Sunday morning circle jerks. Usually, you can&amp;#039;t get that many religious nuisances together at one time unless Bill Donoghue and all the voices in his head have come to dinner. As much as it pains me to say it, good for Fox News for having the day&amp;#039;s most secular panel, although N. Leroy Gingrich is the Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces, so that may perhaps make him somewhat of a quasi-religious warrior, like Joshua, or Fightin&amp;#039; Father Duffy, or Rin-Tin-Tin. The other three networks, I would almost guarantee, are going to spend all of their time in a whole bunch of faith-based palaver that has as much to do with the Gospels as do the last three chapters of I, The Jury. Here&amp;#039;s CBS: And in its second week as an hour-long broadcast, CBS&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Face the Nation&amp;quot; has the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who has been one the most vocal critics of the Obama administration&amp;#039;s controversial insurance coverage plan for contraception. I look forward to seeing Bob Schieffer who, I believed, covered the election of Pius IX, hold Dolan&amp;#039;s feet to the fire on why in hell he gets to meddle in secular politics while the international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice of which he controls one of the largest subsidiaries gets to dodge the taxman. (To be entirely fair to CBS, it appears that Andrew Sullivan will pop by to express theological opinions that may have evolved somewhat since the Council Of Chalcedon. It&amp;#039;s a lonely job, Andrew, but someone has to do it.) David Gregory gets religion, too: On NBC, Meet The Press splits its focus between a 2012 campaign segment featuring Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, and an Easter Sunday roundtable with the archbishop designate of Baltimore, William Lori; evangelist Billy Graham&amp;#039;s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz; Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a United Methodist minister; Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and author Jon Meacham. I&amp;#039;ve never been this happy to see John (32 percent) Kasich on television before. The panel is, of course, a nightmare, beginning with Parson Meacham, who is what St. Paul would have been, had Paul fallen off his horse and hit his head a little harder. Congressman Labrador, picked because he is Mormon, apparently, is a half-birther wingnut, but I suspect the Eighth Commandment is unlikely to come up. I am already more tired of Billy Graham&amp;#039;s spalpeens than I ever was of him. They found a devout Democrat, which must have surprised the hell out of half the Republican party, and here&amp;#039;s Bishop Lori exercising some Christian charity before Congress: When in a state they&amp;#039;re proposing a same-sex marriage law, they always say to religious people &amp;#039;you don&amp;#039;t have to solemnize these marriages so we&amp;#039;re protecting your freedom,&amp;#039; but they want to force us out of foster care and adoption, they want to force us to provide benefits for same-sex couples. The other thing we should not miss is that when we send our kids off to public schools and a lot of places its being drilled into them that the sexual mores taught by the churches are bad, repressive, that same-sex marriage is OK, that homosexuality is all right. Of course if you look at a Western Civ. course the role of Christianity is always portrayed in a negative light, as an impediment to progress. As I say, there is an established religion, it&amp;#039;s really an un-religion, an aggressive secularity, that&amp;#039;s a system of belief and that&amp;#039;s becoming the established &amp;#039;religion&amp;#039; in our country today.  Bishop Lori is a paranoid fruitcake. He&amp;#039;s going to yap about ladyparts, too. You can count on that. Let&amp;#039;s escape to ABC, shall we? After all, they do their Easter duty every year by running The Ten Commandments on Holy Saturday. (&amp;quot;Praise God and down into it!&amp;quot;) Oops. Wrong again. ABC has a special Easter Sunday edition of This Week, featuring evangelical pastor Rick Warren, founder of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. I may never forgive the president for inviting this ecclesiastical chowhound to pray over his inauguration. Pastor Warren puts 20,000 people into his church on Sunday, thereby drawing better than the Pittsburgh Pirates on many weekends. &amp;quot;But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father....&amp;quot; \u2014 Matthew, Chapter 6. One more stop, and we find CNN giving enablement to one of America&amp;#039;s most devout grifters: Cleaver will also stop by CNN&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;State of the Union,&amp;quot; joining the Christian Broadcasting Network&amp;#039;s David Brody and Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed for a roundtable discussion of religion and politics. See, CNN, Ralph Reed is not a religious figure, unless you happen to go to confession every weekend in Indian casinos. His entire involvement in politics has been as a vandal and a shameless charlatan. Here he is in an e-mail from 1998, discussing his missionary work among native Americans: &amp;quot;Hey, now that I&amp;#039;m done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I&amp;#039;m counting on you to help me with some contacts.&amp;quot; \u2014Ralph Reed to Jack Abramoff, via email, November 12, 1998 The only thing he knows about religion is that it&amp;#039;s a good place to look for suckers, and the only thing he knows about politics is that the suckers can make you rich. He also likes to butch it up by talking about &amp;quot;body bags,&amp;quot; as though he were some sort of tough guy, instead of a aluminum-siding salesman with a Bible in one hand, and Jack Abramoff&amp;#039;s dick in the other. If this is the way you&amp;#039;re going to handle religion, kids, why even try? This could have been a real donnybrook. Instead, as we tote up the scorecard, we find that, in its Paschal gatherings, our elite political media could find no room for Catholic liberals, no room for anyone who might inconvenience the Catholic hierarchy, no dissenting voices on gay issues, or on the hundreds of issues surrounding the Church&amp;#039;s finagling with the rights of women. (Atheists? Please, stop, you&amp;#039;re killing me.) But they can find room for a birther Mormon, the Thomas Kinkade of evangelical preachers, Timothy Dolan&amp;#039;s prancing ego, and Ralph Fking Reed. Jesus wept. And with damn good reason. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13529/sunday-panels-get-religion/>