Urine Trouble Now!

Yesterday, we realized that longtime readers might welcome a slight shift in tone, and that we would really like to hear from passersby. We therefore decided to celebrate recent free-speech imbroglios with an hilarious joke of our own device. Sadly, we only got as far as "So the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, a Danish Imam, and five-hundred Wobblies walk into a crowded theater" before remembering that jokes have never been our strong suit. We immediately shifted course.

Nonetheless, the intertwined questions represented therein -- viz., what constitutes "proper" aesthetic representation, how to demarcate individual spheres of liberty, and whether the state has a proper role in regulating speech -- are important, and made us nostalgic for one thing: Piss Christ. Rather than commenting, however, I'd like to solicit your thoughts (even so much as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" would allow us to write off the blog as "research expenses").

We're particularly interested in knowing why, when, and in what terms bodily waste became prima facie not just unpleasant, but politico-theologically offensive. If you're one of those who thinks that Bronze-Age Semitic sky-god lore + Renaissance papal politics should be kept in the American town square, then you presumably believe that people are made in the image of god. You therefore presumably believe that god made urine in his image, too, and that therefore the aesthetically degraded part of "Piss Christ" is not the urine, but the cross itself, no?

We're even worse at theology than at humor, so help us out. If you don't want to comment, at least help by suggesting a relevant joke, the punchline of which is "yellow submarine."