“The Book of Mormon” opens in Rochester today.
The touring company of the hit Broadway musical will work the stage of the Auditorium Theater and thousands will come to watch.
That’s too bad.
The play is a bigoted mockery of your neighbor’s religion. It is the sort of demeaning filth that most decent people in this society claim to disavow.
It is as funny as jokes about kikes and ragheads and mackerel snappers.
Maybe next month they’ll book a minstrel show.
In the era of diversity and tolerance, a half century after a civil rights awakening, with more than two centuries of refining “We believe that all men are created equal,” making fun of religion -- at least this religion -- is not only tolerated, but celebrated as the “in” thing.
Well, I’m not playing along.
I think it is shameful. I think this production demeans the building that houses it, the people who attend it and the community that hosts it.
This is a dark day.
You may dismiss my complaint by saying that I am a thin-skinned Mormon. You may say that I need to lighten up, and get a sense of humor.
You may also tell a black man the same thing if he doesn’t laugh at Amos and Andy.
And be just as wrong.
Mormons are passive people. They don’t make waves. The commandments to be forgiving, and to love everyone, to be meek and gentle, to treat others the way you want to be treated, leave them somewhat mealy mouthed when it comes to standing up for themselves.
Well, I am not a good Mormon.
So I will say it straight.
This mockery of belief is the basest of bigotries. This play is a hateful stomping on the religion and culture of the Mormon people – and is therefore unavoidably a hateful stomping on the people themselves. It is about as funny as joking about the size of a Jew’s nose or his tendency to be focused on money.
As soon as it’s ok to think black people shuffle when they walk, and to laugh about it, it’ll be ok to laugh at this musical.
But if those things sicken you, if you are disgusted by the prejudice they embody, then your conscience knows what you must feel about this play.
Calling hatred satire does not make it stink any less.
This is nothing more than bullying with singing and dancing and admission charged at the door.
In this instance, greasepaint is the same as blackface.
This play takes a book revered like the Bible or the Koran and turns it into theatrical toilet paper. It takes the sacred teachings of a faith and twists them into grotesque scatological and sexual desecrations.
It takes the religious practices of a people and treats them like dirt.
All with the bigot’s air of sophistication. In the name of art, a religion’s most sacred beliefs are spat upon.
A religion for which thousands have died, a faith founded under the protection of the U.S. Constitution, in 2013, in a city proud of its tolerance and diversity, that religion will be made a laughingstock.
Frederick Douglass found a home here.
Susan B. Anthony was tolerated and embraced here.
Refugees are welcomed here.
And scores of houses of worship of every stripe have stood safely and happily here for almost 200 years.
But this week, in this city, it’s ok to laugh at Mormons because they are Mormons. It’s ok to leaf through the other man’s Catechism or Torah or Book of Common Prayer and laugh yourself silly.
We can pretend to be enlightened in this darkest of deeds.
But our pretense is just that, and bigotry is bigotry, and wrong is wrong.
And this play is an abomination.
