Gay playwright and screenwriter Paul Rudnick was assigned by The New Yorker to mock the Hobby Lobby decision and those religious freaks who support it. This came naturally, since Rudnick wrote the satire “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” in which God makes Adam and Steve, along with the first lesbians, Jane and Mabel. In the script’s introduction, he writes “I believe in what human beings can do when you give them fifty bucks to guy some cheap red polyester velvet. Some people need more, something with vengeance and commandments and jihads.”
In a perfectly arrogant example of the self-congratulating secular superiority of The New Yorker and its readership, Rudnick apparently found it hilarious to merge tacky crafting with tacky religious metaphors:
I’ll admit that I wasn’t always such a fervent believer, either in God or in the sort of homemade Mother’s Day cards that can land a person in the emergency room with a hole-punch wound. My commitment to the twin glories of Jesus and yard-sale-ready collectibles began when I was fourteen years old and my parents dragged me to a Christmas Midnight Mass. As I was yawning, and wishing that I was off with my friends in someone’s unchaperoned finished basement, guzzling eggnog laced with cranberry juice, I happened to glance at the Nativity scene on the high altar—where the miracle of Jesus’ birth had been imaginatively interpreted with sock monkeys.
At that very moment, I heard a voice telling me, “Eleanor, go ye forth and tell of the Lord’s wonders, using pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, and enormous Day-Glo crêpe-paper sunflowers with plastic googly eyes and refrigerator-magnet grins.” By the very next day, I had crafted a miniature replica of the Last Supper, entirely out of those tiny Jet-Puffed marshmallows, empty bottles of mini-bar vodka, and human hair.
I soon joined a fast-growing church called Our Lady of the Decoupaged Trinket Box. Our beloved pastor, the Reverend Lionel Harmwater, has led his flock in scrapbooking the entire Bible by adding doily borders to every page, along with oaktag-framed photos of bowling pins on which parishioners have enamelled the faces of their patron saints. This Bible now weighs more than fifty-eight pounds and rests on a reinforced redwood picnic table in the sacristy, surrounded by beeswax candles set inside coffee cans that have been spray-painted to look like spray-painted coffee cans. I love to page through this Bible, to discover pop-up tinfoil angels holding antiqued parchment banners reading “Pray & Crochet!” or “You Can’t Commit Adultery with a Staple Gun!”
Of course, there are plenty of folks who just don’t believe, either in God or in using frayed extension cords to wire together old Frisbees and oven mitts to create a one-of-a-kind holiday wreath for a nursing-home front door. These nonbelievers, or, as I like to call them, people without hand-tooled Navajo-inspired Naugahyde change purses, live mostly in the northeastern portion of America, which, frankly, is a crafting sinkhole.
There is hope, however: a Crafters’ Gospel has just been discovered, rolled up inside a Clorox bottle that had been repurposed as a piggy bank and hidden in a cavern outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This Gospel includes a revelatory sermon in which Jesus, in no uncertain terms, condemns any undecorated surface, including simple pine coffins, which can be made so much more appealing, and therefore more righteous, by adding bottle caps dusted with clear glitter and arranged in snowflake patterns. Jesus also tells us, and here I’m quoting Him directly, that “any truly Christian apron must include both colorful rickrack and a hand-embroidered image of a dancing pepper mill.”
When it comes to the Court’s decision on contraception, I think I can be of service. For my five beautiful daughters, and the other one, I have used a cheerful heavy-gauge yarn, mixing strands of cashmere, alpaca, and barbed wire, to knit what I call a Crotch Cozy. When my girls wear their Crotch Cozies, they not only receive endless compliments in the locker room but sexual intercourse becomes impossible. Any additional form of birth control is unnecessary. Case closed.
