I've been thinking it for years, but I'm finally going to say it-Easter is confusing and scary.
If you hadn't had any religious training and showed up in America on Easter, you would understand it as a commemoration of the time when the Easter Bunny died for the sins of man, came back to life three days later, ate half a pound of ham and hid a basket of severely diseased hard-boiled eggs in the tall grass behind his shed.
Like all our holidays, modern Easter is a mishmash of secular and religious symbolism, Hallmarkized and dressed in a cheerful pastel dress.
So I was surprised to hear that the Glassport, Penn., Assembly of God managed to further confuse and upset Easter revelers this year.
According to the Associated Press, the church started its celebration early, holding a \performance"" in a city stadium Saturday. Their show culminated with several actors-I am not making this up-savagely whipping the Easter Bunny.
Correction: The actors didn't whip the Easter Bunny. They flogged their pastor, Patty Bickerton, who was dressed in a bunny costume. AP says the actors yelled ""there is no Easter Bunny,"" and smashed Easter eggs at a performance intended to demonstrate to adults and children ""how Jesus was crucified.""
Melissa Salzman told AP her young son TJ reacted in pretty much the way you'd expect from a four-year-old subjected to a perverse display of violence and suffering.
""He was crying and asking me why the bunny was being whipped,"" she said.
Pastor Bickerton answered the crowd's shock with all the deft understanding you might expect from someone who conceptualizes her faith through rabbit torture.
""We wanted to convey that Easter is not just about the Easter Bunny; it is about Jesus Christ,"" she told AP.
I'm not sure why some people think lessons about Jesus' love are incomplete without prolonged horsewhipping. Also, I'm not convinced that teaching children about Christ's resurrection demands the assault and humiliation of the Easter Bunny or the destruction of his eggs. Before Christmas every year, a lot of churches put up signs admonishing passersby to ""Keep the Christ in Christmas,"" but most of them stop short of setting Santa Claus on fire and pushing him into traffic.
Of course, Pennsylvanian Assemblies of God aren't the only places that mangle Easter into a disturbing semi-psychotic tableau.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue plays host each year to an ""Easter Egg Roll."" On the day after Easter Sunday, government officials and cartoon mascots gather on the White House lawn to watch kids chase colored eggs around and cry hysterically.
Even crazier, by some accounts, the White House Easter Egg Roll started in 1878 after Congress banned children from rolling eggs at the Capitol and an army of angry kids stormed the gates of President Rutherford B. Hayes.
This year, the weirdness of the Egg Roll was matched only by President Bush's word choice in his Easter Message.
As if he was copying Hayes' message 126 years ago, Bush called for ""peace in the affairs of men.""
He were mysterious about his wishes for the affairs of women-or bunnies for that matter.
Dan is a senior majoring in journalism. He can be reached at dlhinkel@wisc.edu. His column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal.
