SI, SATAN, GOD, AND PIZZA HUT
In a pretty transparent move to stay relevant, Sports Illustrated selected an 81 year old woman and a transgender woman to be cover models in 2023.
While Sports Illustrated purportedly chose these two in order to lionize all different types of women ( a motive deemed specious even by lesbian Sports Illustrated contributor Frankie de la Cretaz), it seems that SIs true intent was to incite outrage amongst those who feel it is their business to be the morality police for the rest of us.
Not suprisingly it worked.
Also not surprisingly, many of the objections to the covers, particularly of Petras, are based in Christian standards of morality. When I saw the story on Facebook, I couldn’t help but read the comments and many, many of them attribute the cover to ……
Ahhhh…. Satan. Every time I hear the name I cannot help but think of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. In an interlude during the play, Miller writes that he is astounded the the line “ We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise” uttered by Satan obsessed Reverend Hale has never elicited a laugh from the audience as he intended it to.
Perhaps the idea of Satan should not be a laughing matter. While it is easy to be entertained by stories of Satan losing a fiddling contest to Johnny down in Georgia, it is not entertaining to watch the nuttily religious attribute everything that they don’t like to a living evil. Hence, in 2023, people actually believe that the enemy of God inspired Sports Illustrated to put a transgender human being on the cover of a magazine that most likely nobody would have cared about had they not done so.
But, since SI DID do it, the soldiers of Christ are putting on their armor and going to war.
In their minds, they are warriors. They may be placid in appearance, but within their souls is a dichotomy that propels them to fight against people simply because thos people have been living their own physical and mental dichotomies for years and now choose not to. Christ’s warriors say that is not ok, and it is poisoning the country….please.
I don’t remember everything from my Catholic days , but I do remember some things pretty clearly . Int he Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus says “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”.
So, it seems to me that if you are equating a picture of a trangender person with the work of Satan, you aren’t loving your neighbor AND you aren’t loving God because if you were, you would love thy neighbor.
Many of these folks, though , also believe in “QAnon” which is “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media” (NyTimes). Hmmm a group of elites with money and power who propagate child sexual predators and have political power? Kinda like…I dunno…the Catholic Church?
So, SI has succeeded in stoking the fires of discontent even if their content cannot do it in and of itself without being deliberately instigatory.
This is where Pizza Hut comes in. For decades, Pizza Hut has survived despite making no changes to their actual gut destroying “pizza”. Instead, they fiddle incessantly with the CRUST surrounding their bland pies and leave the actual pizza alone. The result is tangential excitement about the outer edge of the pizza while the actual content remains lame.
The result is a something ostensibly exciting but ultimately tasteless…like what SI has chosen to do.