Thanks, but no thanks, you fundie bastards:
A talking Jesus doll has been turned down by the Marine Reserves’ Toys for Tots program.
A suburban Los Angeles company offered to donate 4,000 of the foot-tall dolls, which quote Bible verses, for distribution to needy children this holiday season.
Kudos to the Corps. While they chalk up the rejection in part to being a government entity that cannot show preference to one religion over another, they also admit the dirty secret about talking Jesus dolls:
Grein also questioned whether children would welcome a gift designed for religious instruction. “Kids want a gift for the holiday season that is fun,” he said.
There you have it: the marines have officially designated religious instruction as un-fun. In this matter, I can safely say I support our troops.
I dunno, if I were Jesus, I would appreciate the fact that the Marines were not giving the gift of lame to needy children in my name.
What would an R. Mildred, or a zuzu doll say?…
An R. Mildred doll would be a serious collectors item after parents demanded it removed from toy store shelves almost immediately.
I’m glad the Marines got to the heart of this. All I could think when I read that was, “What kind of stingy, unsympathetic asshole donates unfun toys to needy children?” This was vile on a number of levels, but the main one was how classist it is, because the implication is that the poor don’t deserve pleasure. It really goes back to things like how abortion restrictions seemed designed to punish the poor for fucking but not the rich. But this was especially repugnant, since the people who are being told that they shouldn’t have any joy at all are the most helpless amongst us.
Q: “What kind of stingy, unsympathetic asshole donates unfun toys to needy children?”
A: The kind of stingy, unsympathetic asshole who would manufacture unfun toys.
I want a Left_Wing_Fox doll.
It’ll be battery operated to hide in a corner to lurk.
It’ll giggle with a “hehe” whenever it hears laugher.
Every once in a while, it’ll mis-speak, then offer a mis-correction, a correction, and either Erf! Or Gah!
And once in a while, it would break into a minute long tirade about wonkish policy ideas as the volume slowly fades out.
But this was especially repugnant, since the people who are being told that they shouldn’t have any joy at all are the most helpless amongst us.
I didn’t even think of it that way. It’s like they’re mocking kids for being poor. How fucking Christian.
We experimented with this, but the overhead in battery-usage was prohibitive. Still, the Kyso dolls (with complementary stake and woodchips), are selling real well in Arkansas…
Finally I can like the marines for something! When I first heard this I thought of the talking Jeebuz doll that ToyPresidents makes which we have at my work (a comics and collectables shop). Whenever I see things like that I always wonder who they got to do the voice for the doll, and does that person use that on their voice-acting resume?
It really goes back to things like how abortion restrictions seemed designed to punish the poor for fucking but not the rich.
Well you see they’re trying to earn their way into heaven, so there’s some sort of fundigelical spiritual balance sheet whereby they can make up for all their sex and abortions by trying (afaik, it doesn’t matter if they succeed, it’s the attempt that God loves apparently) to make sure that 5 other people do not engage in sex or have abortions, you become “sin neutral” and can go to heaven.
I think it comes from the basic fact that if you’re born high enough up in the social strata, the fact that the rest of society is there expressly to make sure that you don’t have to suffer is taken to the logical conclusion that the meek aren’t going to inherit the earth so much as they’re just, you know, being meek so as to make sure there’s enough seats for you and your buddies when the bus to heaven arrives.
Cue confused rich person wondering what a bus is.
R. Mildred – “Well you see they’re trying to earn their way into heaven, so there’s some sort of fundigelical spiritual balance sheet whereby they can make up for all their sex and abortions by trying (afaik, it doesn’t matter if they succeed, it’s the attempt that God loves apparently) to make sure that 5 other people do not engage in sex or have abortions, you become “sin neutral” and can go to heaven.”
Is it always a 5 to 1 ratio of converts to excuse a sinner, or does it vary by religion or sin?…
Oh, and what exactly is this “bus” you refer to?…
We experimented with this, but the overhead in battery-usage was prohibitive. Still, the Kyso dolls (with complementary stake and woodchips), are selling real well in Arkansas…
Do I come with different outfits and accessories? Can the kids burn a tiny replica of my massage manuals and erotica books and aromatherapy recipe books? Not to mention all that godless science, although I’m a bit short on biology, the most Satanic of the sciences.
We’ll get solid-state batteries for the R Mildred dolls. Even if we had only enough power and space to hold a recitation of her post on anorexia, that’d be enough to wreck havoc on little girl’s minds and future high school social orders. Few things are more dangerous than that person that makes you go, “hey, I never thought of it like that. I guess that does piss me off.”
Ooohhhh – Twisty Faster dolls, with a booklet of the public cans of Austin, TX.
I think we might have to go matter-antimatter reactions if we want enough energy for the RM doll.
There isn’t a kid alive who wouldn’t be happier with a 6-pack of tube socks or a 3-pack of underpants under the tree, than this dumb thing. What Toys for Tots should have said was, “Thanks but no thanks. We’re in the business of giving away toys. This thing would destroy our reputation with every kid on the planet.”
A toy like “Talking Jesus!” is taylor-made for being used on the childhood artillery range:
Fire cracker to blow it up or target practice with a BB gun or a 22…
The wicked neighbor kid from Toy Story would have a few hours of enjoyment with a toy as lame as that (and let’s face it – we all either knew a kid like that or we WERE that kid…)…
yes, but the text in them has all been replaced with Satanic invocations: except for the erotica, which, well, keeps getting confiscated by the Mommies before the dolls get passed on, for some reason…
Oh, I almost forgot – we had to discontinue the Twisty dolls because they kept destroying all the clothing meant for the other dolls, getting the Barbies drunk and seducing them, and …. well, lets say the ex-GI Joe dolls are now a hot item in the hareems.
Does Jesus look like a really creepy William Riker to anyone else?
Is it always a 5 to 1 ratio of converts to excuse a sinner, or does it vary by religion or sin?…
Oddly the ratio is inversly proportion to the nastiness of the sin, so that peadophilia or mass murder only requires a 2:1 ratio, while masturbating on a sunday requires you to convert the entire population of a large country.
Does Jesus look like a really creepy William Riker to anyone else?
I’m more impressed by the wonderfully blue eyes he’s got, no wonder that nasty homosexual jew judas wanted him dead, he was obviously jealous of those gorgeous eyes Our Lord Who Art A Zombie inherited from his father.
Why is it so hard for these people to do one version of jesus, JUST ONE ffs, that didn’t involve him having some insanely aryan aspect to his physical appearance? But I guess it’s not important that he was an anti-authoritarian jew who pissed off both the roman invaders of Judea and the collaborationist jewish authorities they’d set up among the jewish populace by rejecting consumerist religion, setting up small radical theopolitical communes and preaching a message of communism and love to the downpressed and screwed over. Nope, because if all that stuff was important, then there’d be serious trouble with these assholes making money off of crappy foot high (WTF!?) plastic aslans, and selling it off to charities.