It's Eastertime Again, Tra-la!

Greetings, my faithful ones, and a Happy Easter to all!

Well, I finally found out how Easter Day is determined each year. It's the first Sunday of the first full moon of Spring. You may never need to know that, but it might make you sound smarter if you pop that little factoid on a first date.

I pretty much meet the definition of a "South Park Conservative." I guess this means that I no longer hold up as a liberal at all. Funny how long it sometimes takes us to change a self-image that has become outworn.

But what shall those of us who are South Park Conservatives -- and Christians, too -- do about South Park the TV show?

I haven't been watching the show for very long. So many others, on the blogosphere's libertarian Right, have been talking about it that I started recently. Just in time to catch the last several re-runs and the start of this season.

What to say...what to say? Well, of course it's funny as hell. Wickedly hilarious, as a matter of fact. The sight of all those compassionate leftists with their plastic dead-fetus-sticking-out-of-the-head hats during "Coinjoined Twin Myalexia Week" had me in tears of merriment. And when the Smug rolled out of San Francisco -- joining the cloud of Smug from George Clooney's Academy Awards speech to form a Hurricane Katrina-scale threat -- I laughed so loud I frightened my pets right out of the room.

This show takes on a lot of liberal vanities and makes you laugh at them instead of getting mad or, even worse, feeling that there must be something wrong with you because you recognize them as the empty conceits they really are. And there's certainly a lot to be said for that. In the entertainment industry -- a racket drunk on Smug -- this is sorely needed.

Then came the much-ballyhooed Muhammad on The Family Guy episode. Which they HAD to know Comedy Central was going to weenie out and censor. Was there much to like about the ballsy stand the show took? Of course there was.

I know the "Jesus" part took place during a supposed Islamofascist propaganda video. They can claim (as surely they do) that this was actually a backhanded compliment to the fact that though we Christians might be offended, we will respond in a far more grownup, civilized and...well...Christian manner than did so much of the Muslim world in the wake of those Danish cartoons.

And indeed, I will protest South Park's blasphemy in a suitably Christian manner. Instead of staging a one-woman riot in the street or burning life-sized effigies of Cartman, I will simply stop watching the show.

Does this sound like an extreme response? Perhaps, to many, it may seem so. And it's too bad my support of South Park has to be so short-lived. But I am a newly-minted libertarian conservative second, and a Christian first and foremost of all.

I can't bring myself to believe the show had to include such a disgraceful mockery of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, just to get their point across. There surely had to be another way.

I do not consider Jesus to be just another religious figure, on a par with Muhammad, or Buddha, or Moses or anybody else. I believe that Jesus is God.

Christians believe that on the very first Easter Sunday morning, Jesus walked out of the tomb in which He had been sealed to spend eternity in death. And that because of this, we will spend eternity with Him, joyously alive.

I hope you don't consider this post a downer. For it speaks of the greatest upper of them all.