Stolen from Twitter, but entirely true: the entire South puts on a Nativity play for Christmas...

[Recursion]

... which is about a Middle Eastern family fleeing from violence and seeking a safe place to stay.

[DetlefK]

1. To be fair, they were Jews/Christians in the Bible.

And if art is to be believed, they were perfect, upstanding Aryans. Not short, brown-skinned people with black hair.

[Recursion]

2. As Plato said: art is not to be believed (nt)

[JoePhilly]

8. Jeb's chosen ones!!

[ladyVet]

3. Yeah, let's keep on using that broad brush.

It's not like people around here don't knock the South enough.

By the way, we're not all religious fundies down here. No more than all of the North are good liberal atheists. Many of us lean further left than most on DU. We're currently outnumbered to some extent, but with the lack of concern from Democratic leadership, don't be surprised to find the vocal right wing gets out the vote.

[hobbit709]

4. you're right about the national party leadership.

They come down here to TX, take our donations and then forget about us until the next election cycle.
The main reason I no longer donate to the national party.

[Orrex]

9. Send a few of your lefty Southerners up here to Pennsylvania, please!

Last night one of my community's FB pages was the kind of bigoted cesspit that would offend even the worst movie stereotype of a Southern white sheriff.

The notion that the south has cornered the market on racism is ridiculous and directly contradicted by reality.

[d_r]

5. They were going to

Joseph's family's ancestral home to be counted in the census, not fleeing violence.

[Fumesucker]

6. Beat me to it

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. Correct

This was the device needed for the OT prophecy (that the Messiah would be from the city of David, i.e., Bethlehem) to be applied to somebody well-known to be of Nazarene birth. The Messiah can't be from Nazareth; he must be from Bethlehem. How to solve this problem? Make Joseph from Bethlehem, where he must return to be counted in the census. That way, the person obviously from Nazareth can be from Bethlehem, both in terms of bloodline and in terms of actual birth.

It's a story-telling device to align features of the life of Jesus with features of the OT prophecies. It also has the value of being a parable about hospitality. It's quite likely, of course, that the whole episode was invented after the fact by the Gospel writers.

[Orrex]

7. My own fine town in western PA is having a very loud Bigotry Pageant of its own

Nationally, I wish that we could pin our racism and hatred on one region, but it's just about everywhere.

[kairos12]

10. Too nuanced for Rethugs.

[B2G]

12. I wasn't aware the South consisted of 22 states...

[gollygee]

13. You'll have to add Michigan to your list of southern states

since our governor did the same thing.