Crackergate comes to a close

Well, PZ did the deed.

"Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything."

Truer words have never been spoken.

To be honest, at first I was a little worried about the whole ordeal - PZ is an excellent firebrand, passionately advocating sanity against a host of superstitions, but he has a talent for rubbing believers the wrong way, even when he's right. Especially when he's right. But after Donohue started a witch-hunt against him, it's hard not to appreciate what he's doing.

It all started when he came to the defense of a student who had wandered out of Mass with the infamous cracker, and had unwittingly triggered an avalanche of hysterics: the faithful made silly claims that their God had been held hostage and that they student engaged in "hate speech". All over a cracker. PZ quickly took them to task on his blog, and ended the post with a threat to desecrate a sacred cracker himself. Was that going over the line? Maybe. Maybe not.

But then Donohue, whose sole job seems to be getting offended and then demanding that the heinous criminals responsible for his personal discomfort be fired on behalf of Catholics everywhere, set his minions loose on poor PZ's mailbox, flooding it with barely legible death threats and all manner of horrendously unpleasant screeds, all while calling PZ a hate-filled bigot. Feel the love.

Threatening to kill a fellow human being...over a cracker. Now that's a disturbing morality.

If what someone does to a cracker in the privacy of their own home is apparently intolerable enough to warrant such outrageous behavior then this is one sacred cow whose spell absolutely must be broken.