Does This Bother You?

Some "civil rights" groups have decided that it is important to get out the vote, and by correlation, to make sure as many (minority) people as possible are counted in the upcoming 2010 census.  Below, see one poster developed with the intention of deployment in Hispanic Evangelical churches.  The poster below, of course, is the English text; the both the English and Spanish versions are available here.

This poster should strike sincere Christians as problematic for a few purposes.  I will list off a few:

1. The poster is itself fairly clearly blasphemous, using the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary for merely secular, political purposes... that is, in vain; this sin is very serious; the quotation of scripture (Mt 1:18, "This is how Jesus was born,") for such purposes strikes me as a violation of the Second Commandment in a similar vein;

2. The secular-minded groups are very cynically using the churches for their purposes;

3. The "Christian" churches accepting solicitations to display these posters will apparently not mind either the blasphemy or being used, perhaps because of complicity in the motivations of the secular-minded groups;

4. The posters and the groups behind them neglect to mention the cultural-political background of the events in the early life of the Holy Family, in which the Caesar's census was very clearly a bad thing - a tool of oppression;

5. It is arguably a violation of the legitimate separation of Church and State to employ churches in purely political work, although because the Census office is not actually involved with the poster, I am not sure that it is... this requires some mulling over.

USA Today has a reasonably balanced news story about the ad campaign.  To register your shock and outrage, you might go to the feedback page on CivilRights.org's website.  In my gut I feel there are more reasons to object strongly to this sacrilegious propaganda, but I cannot think further now, because I am still sputtering.  Thanks to Mr. Dave Tenney for pointing this out to me.

Español

I love Spanish. It is a beautiful language that has arisen from and connected an array of complex and diverse cultures. It is a language that can be both forceful and direct, and yet sustains rich nuance. There are an array of local dialects because of different regional influences, primarily native American indigenous. But even the core language has some interesting twists. Like all the modern Romance languages, it has a latinate core vocabulary with a germanized grammar, and its inflection has been moderated over time. Because of the seven centuries of foreign domination by the (peace-loving, of course) Muslim Moors, its vocabulary also has a good deal of Arabic influence, which is somewhat unusual in the Romance languages.
Its writers have opted for the phonetic approach to spelling. That is, when absorbing a foreign word into the Spanish vocabulary, they have changed its spelling to make it conform to the Spanish phonetic system, so spelling is generally an easy task. The other basic approach, the philological approach, preserves foreign spellings of words as the words are introduced into the language, so that the language becomes an apparently unruly hodgepodge of rules and exceptions. English is the best example most people run into.

But what is bothering me right now is that I cannot find my Oxford Spanish Dictionary, last seen in the hands of one of my roommates (maybe), and AWOL for six months or so now. It's funny though, because it just occurred to me to pray St. Anthony to find it. If anyone sees it walking around without me, please scold it about the dangers of booknapping, and send it right home. Thanks!