M_any people have been wondering exactly what edged the Supreme Court toward its recent decision involving Hobby Lobby, the chain of crafts stores that has been allowed a religious exemption from funding birth control for its employees. An urgent letter has come to light, which may clarify the matter._
To the Supreme Court, especially Justice Scalia, who is a prime candidate for the benefits of therapeutic elder-crafting in a calming environment:
My name is Eleanor Crimley-Dabbins, and as one of this country’s most dedicated crafters, and a three-time second runner-up in our local Let’s Get Craftin’ Craftboree here in San Diego, I would like to express how thoroughly crafting is intertwined with my deepest religious convictions.
A careful reading of Genesis reveals that when the Serpent first offered Eve the apple she replied, “I bet if I shellacked that apple and studded it with fragrant cloves, and then hot-glued the whole thing with an overlay of jumbo red sequins, it would make a darling year-round ornament for our Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
To which Adam, Eve’s husband, responded, “That sounds great, sweetheart. Why don’t you get crackin’ while I finish creating a rustic gun rack from all these hooves and antlers? Because animal parts aren’t just for eatin’—they’re for craftin’!”
So, as you can see, crafting started on practically Day One of the Judeo-Christian world. Why, some folks claim that our planet itself is just a doodad the Almighty came up with after spinning His Rainy-Day-Fun, Pick-a-Project Activities Wheel.
As civilization progressed, so did crafting. Moses originally intended to use his home woodburning kit to char the Ten Commandments onto a knotty-pine plaque, which could also be used, with the addition of screw-in brass-plated hooks, as a holdall for house keys, but he ultimately settled on a poured-resin, look-of-granite option. I like to think that Moses wanted to include an Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Use Condoms or Real Stained Glass, Not When the Acrylic Colors Are Even More Vibrant and Easier to Keep Clean!
I’ll admit that I wasn’t always such a fervent believer, either in God or in the sort of homemade Mother’s Day cards that can land a person in the emergency room with a hole-punch wound. My commitment to the twin glories of Jesus and yard-sale-ready collectibles began when I was fourteen years old and my parents dragged me to a Christmas Midnight Mass. As I was yawning, and wishing that I was off with my friends in someone’s unchaperoned finished basement, guzzling eggnog laced with cranberry juice, I happened to glance at the Nativity scene on the high altar—where the miracle of Jesus’ birth had been imaginatively interpreted with sock monkeys.
At that very moment, I heard a voice telling me, “Eleanor, go ye forth and tell of the Lord’s wonders, using pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, and enormous Day-Glo crêpe-paper sunflowers with plastic googly eyes and refrigerator-magnet grins.” By the very next day, I had crafted a miniature replica of the Last Supper, entirely out of those tiny Jet-Puffed marshmallows, empty bottles of mini-bar vodka, and human hair.
I soon joined a fast-growing church called Our Lady of the Decoupaged Trinket Box. Our beloved pastor, the Reverend Lionel Harmwater, has led his flock in scrapbooking the entire Bible by adding doily borders to every page, along with oaktag-framed photos of bowling pins on which parishioners have enamelled the faces of their patron saints. This Bible now weighs more than fifty-eight pounds and rests on a reinforced redwood picnic table in the sacristy, surrounded by beeswax candles set inside coffee cans that have been spray-painted to look like spray-painted coffee cans. I love to page through this Bible, to discover pop-up tinfoil angels holding antiqued parchment banners reading “Pray & Crochet!” or “You Can’t Commit Adultery with a Staple Gun!”
Of course, there are plenty of folks who just don’t believe, either in God or in using frayed extension cords to wire together old Frisbees and oven mitts to create a one-of-a-kind holiday wreath for a nursing-home front door. These nonbelievers, or, as I like to call them, people without hand-tooled Navajo-inspired Naugahyde change purses, live mostly in the northeastern portion of America, which, frankly, is a crafting sinkhole.
There is hope, however: a Crafters’ Gospel has just been discovered, rolled up inside a Clorox bottle that had been repurposed as a piggy bank and hidden in a cavern outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This Gospel includes a revelatory sermon in which Jesus, in no uncertain terms, condemns any undecorated surface, including simple pine coffins, which can be made so much more appealing, and therefore more righteous, by adding bottle caps dusted with clear glitter and arranged in snowflake patterns. Jesus also tells us, and here I’m quoting Him directly, that “any truly Christian apron must include both colorful rickrack and a hand-embroidered image of a dancing pepper mill.”
When it comes to the Court’s decision on contraception, I think I can be of service. For my five beautiful daughters, and the other one, I have used a cheerful heavy-gauge yarn, mixing strands of cashmere, alpaca, and barbed wire, to knit what I call a Crotch Cozy. When my girls wear their Crotch Cozies, they not only receive endless compliments in the locker room but sexual intercourse becomes impossible. Any additional form of birth control is unnecessary. Case closed! ♦
