How long did Rosie O’Donnell wait to say something offensive to believing American Christians — about five seconds?

Since I would watch “The View” only about as willingly as I would watch any other women-prattling-endlessly show, which is to say ‘not at all’, I didn’t catch Rosie’s remarks during the September 11 show, which was supposed to have had something to do with a reasonable person’s thoughts on 9/11. Instead, Rosie made sure to get in a riff for Christianity-bashing (link with video is HERE):

(”View” co-host Elizabeth) Hasselbeck noted that the funding of radical Islam is widespread. O’Donnell again interrupted and said, “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.”

So … in this corner, we have an armed, militant faction of a religion that has killed men, women and children indiscriminately around the world, taken prisoners and decapitated them on film while chanting that their god is great, uttered threats against every person who lives in a Western civilization (and a great many that don’t, including those of other sects of their own religion), suppressed its own women with violence to subjugate their wills entirely … oh, and — memo to Rosie — has never been timid about punishing homosexuals (see HERE if you need an example). In the other corner, we have American Christians, who stage rallies, vote against gay marriage (along with a lot of non-Christians), have their share of idiots who resort to verbal abuse to make their case but never escalate to anything like real jihad and whose stated objective — along with all Christians — is to bring the whole world to the knowledge of One they believe to be the Prince of Peace.

And Rosie’s a little fuzzy on the difference. All looks the same to her.

Why in the world do people not collectively boo someone off the stage when they utter complete garbage like this? Why …

Well, I could go on, but there’s no point. I know why. I think anyone who’s over the age of about 12 really knows why. Rosie might be a blabbermouth (and I wouldn’t be surprised if she has to either apologize or quit), but she’s just saying out loud what many, many others have implied or said less loudly. Completely unreasonable statements aren’t seen as being completely unreasonable if they can refer back to the emotional core issue that we have to go over and over and OVER. Once again, it’s Right vs. Left, and — somewhere contained therein, though I think many well-intentioned Christians would like to believe otherwise — Christianity vs. Left. I don’t say that because Christianity has to be conservative; I say it because the Left is unwilling to make distinctions and really, really hates American Christianity. Trying to occasionally butt in with the fact that there are some Orthodox that aren’t that crazy about it either is apparently beside the point. We’re all lumped in together.

And what is that lump? Well, as Rosie has it, it’s ‘radical Christianity,’ whatever that is. It would be easy to say that she only means people who distribute Chick Tracts detailing who’s going to hell this week. But you’d really have to be wearing a particularly opaque pair of (ha ha) rose-colored glasses to say that. I have a sneaking suspicion she means anyone who believes (a) that sin separates us from God, and (b) that homosexuality is a sin. In other words, anyone who subscribes to the historic position of the Christian Church and doesn’t play fast and loose with the Scriptures.

That’s it. If we’d pitch that stuff, redefine marriage as anything that anyone does with anyone or anything, and stop pretending that some values are more beneficial to all of humanity and that there are things that are true whether we want them to be true or not, well then, it’s all be fine. We wouldn’t be as bad as the murderously radical Muslims anymore, and she’d give us free tickets to see some movie she made before she became so offensive and self-important.

We’ll never make it. We do all realize it, right? The things we’d have to cave to in order to satisfy those who rail against us leave us useless to ourselves and the world. “When the salt has lost its flavor, with what shall it be salted?” There’s nothing else in the world like Christianity. There never has been. It came from outside of all of our plans, our philosophies, our best intentions and worst nightmares. It’s no use pretending for the sake of contemptuous talk-show personalities that it’s ours to filet until she gets to a part she finds palatable.

Besides, who are we kidding? If they start fileting Christianity, do we have any doubt that Orthodoxy won’t survive the first cut?