Ants on a Crucifix in Norman Rockwell’s America



Dec 7, 2010
Elizabeth Scalia

Last October, the Smithsonian Institute opened the “Hide/Seek” exhibit, which, as the Washington Post’s Blake Gopnik writes, “surveys how same-sex love has been portrayed in art, from Walt Whitman’s hints to open declarations in the era of AIDS and Robert Mapplethorpe’s bullwhips.” Gopnik praised the show hugely, calling it “courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art.”

The exhibit seemed destined for an uncontroversial run until CNS News threw conservatives red-meat and called “Hide/Seek” a “Christmas Season exhibit.” News that the exhibit included David Wojnarowicz’s thirty-minute video “A Fire in My Belly,”which contains an 11-second image of ants crawling on a crucifix, lit a fire in the bellies of conservative American Christians, who put “ants,” “crucifix” and “Christmas” into their interior search engines and linked up to “fury.”
the rest image

To be fair to them, if they seem hyper-vigilant about discerning insults toward Christmas, it is only because the forces of political correctness have often gone to absurd lengths to denude the season of meaning, and excise it from the public square. In the bizarro-world of progressive thought, even if ninety percent of Americans celebrate some aspect of Christmas, the sensibilities of the ten percent who do not observe it must be protected from all of those tidings of comfort and joy.