Please, stop getting baited by performative outrage

If it sounds too crazy to be true, it probably is.

I try to avoid writing about national politics, but sometimes I can’t help it. It’s all I was thinking about when heading into the newspaper office on Monday morning.

I was trying to enjoy the Easter holiday this past weekend with family, and I was able to for a time, but instead, I found myself putting out fires on social media.

And who set those fires? It was bad political actors who were fomenting hate by spreading lies and blatant disinformation.

You may know what I’m talking about if you were on Facebook or Twitter over the weekend, or perhaps if you get your news from conservative media outlets like Fox News, ONN or Newsmax. 

On Saturday, Donald Trump’s campaign issued a public statement condemning the Biden White House for prohibiting children from submitting religious egg designs for an Easter Egg Roll event, as well as declaring Easter Sunday as a “Trans Day of Visibility.”

Trump demanded the “blasphemous” Biden administration apologize for its years-long assault on the Christian faith.

Too many people took the bait to count, including Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who called Biden a “national disgrace” for banning religious symbols and said he was slapping Christians in the face, even calling out incumbent U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown for staying silent “out of fear of the radical trans lobby.”

If you’d only gotten your information from these news outlets and public figures, you’d think Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic for over 70 years, intentionally went out of his way to insult Christians. Sen. Tommy Tuberville easily took the bait, claiming it was part of a Satanic cult. As did former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, who said it was part of the communist takeover playbook.

But context matters.

Trans Visibility Day has been March 31 since it was established 15 years ago by activist Rachel Crandall-Crocker in 2009. It was created because at the time, the only day transgender people had was the Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20 for trans people who die each year. Randall-Crocker wanted a more positive day for the community. That’s it. 

This may come as a surprise, but Biden’s White House issued an ordinance recognizing Trans Day of Visibility in 2023, 2022 and 2021. 

No one cared then. How come? 

Well if you’re a good Christian, you should know that Easter isn’t the same day every year. It is held on the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. Because of this, Easter moves between March 22 and April 25. It just so happened to be March 31 this year. The fact that they overlapped was completely random.

End of (manufactured) controversy.

And what about those religious symbols being banned by the White House for the Easter Egg Roll event? That had to be an intentional slight against Christians too, right?

Wrong again. 

The Easter Egg Roll event is held by the American Egg Board as a way to promote the U.S. egg industry. The American Egg Board has partnered with the White House for 47 years and religious symbols have been prohibited from designs the entire time “because they can’t be seen promoting one religion or viewpoint over another.” They can’t even promote one type of egg over another type of egg. It’s been that way for the past 45 years — yes, including from 2017-2020 when Donald Trump was president.

So how come you didn’t hear anyone declaring Trump’s White House was declaring war on Christianity any of those years?

Maybe because people in the media and politics had better things to do at the time than manufacture outrage just to rile people up and turn Christians against one another.

We need to improve our critical thinking skills. My “BS” detector was on red alert when I saw those initial headlines and it only took a small bit of digging to get to the truth. We need to do a better job of not only calling out these people manufacturing outrage for the frauds they are, but also stopping these egregious assaults on American intelligence in their tracks before they gain any steam.

As the famous saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

I’ve seen first hand that a lie people want to believe can sink into someone’s skull so deep that no amount of fact-checking or truth-telling can change their mind.

And in case anyone from the perpetual outrage machine is looking for the next time they can get upset, I also have a breaking news alert. According to the Gregorian calendar, the next time Easter will be held on March 31 is 2086, a full 62 years from now. 

Maybe by then, people will have learned to lighten up a little.