May 8th, 2007
You Might Sample “The Death Cookie” Too, While You’re At It…
Andrew Sullivan discovers Jack Chick…
A 1984 evangelical Christian cartoon pamphlet, helpfully put online here. Don’t tell Hewitt. It could upset the Popular Front. (I think the racial stuff is out of date.)
Try some of his anti-Catholic pamphlets while you’re at it. Oh…and the anti-Gay ones. My favorite, the one that really lets you see that open sewer Chick calls a conscience, is the one where he tells the parents of kids who have commited suicide that their children are burning in hell…
May 9th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
I discovered Jack Chick when I was around 16 0r 17, quite by accident-I was looking through a drawer in our kitchen and came across a tract titled “That Crazy Guy!”, which had a picture of a guy with a prop-comedy arrow on his head, a la Steve Martin. Thinking it was just a mini comic book, I began reading it and couldn’t decide to laugh or cry.
The tract told the story of a teenage girl, “Susie”, who’s preparing for a date with a guy she’s just met. She decides to seek advice from her neighbor, “Ms. Damien”(!) a trampy woman who apparently has nothing better to do but give half-assed advice on sex to teenaged girls. Susie decides to have sex with the guy, and then observes, “That wasn’t at all what I expected. I never want to see that guy again!” She then worries she may be pregnant, but this turns out not to be the case. Her relief is short-lived, when her doctor (who also happens to be an obnoxious fundie) tells her she has herpes, for which there’s no cure. If she wants to have a child, they’ll have to deliver him by “cutting open your tummy” (Yes, the DOCTOR says this to the 16-year-old. Apparently neither of them is familiar with the term “C-section”) He then lectures her that she should have remained a virgin until she got married. So I guess the lesson is, “Sex is so horrible it leaves you wishing you’d never met the person you were with. So, save it for someone you plan to live with for the rest of your life.”
There’s also a brief discussion about homosexuality, in which Susie says we should understand the emotional needs of gays. (Chick lumps homosexuals together with pedophiles in his definition of them) The doctor informs her that homosexuals were once executed, and anyone who has a homosexual experience deserves to be cast into a lake of fire (that would include victims of pedophiles, per Chick’s own definition, but he seems to have overlooked this.)
About a decade later I came across a revised edition that omits the section on homosexuality and other parts of the original. Susie contracts AIDS in that version.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Oh…and my parents were Catholic, so I honestly have no idea how that tract got in our house. But I found it disturbing, because it meant that somebody in my family had saved it, and may have agreed with its messages.