Compare (Photo: Joe.My.God. reader Francisco)
Contrast (Photo: KGO/ABC News San Francisco)
I love a Monday morning mystery.
Take a look at the two pictures above. The top photo is from a reader at Joe.My.God. who is identified as Francisco. That pic showed up around 5:37 this morning in my RSS reader. The gist of the story was that Joe thinks some fool has played into the hands of religious homophobes by vandalizing a “gay-friendly” Catholic Church with anti-Prop-H8, anti-Catholic graffiti.
What first struck me was the fact that the names Ratzinger and Niederauer were both spelled correctly. I’ve written a couple of posts about Bishop Niederauer and his Mormon connections, and I still have to look up the correct spelling of his name. So, it struck me as curious that here we have a tagger who can spell two odd foreign names and who, by virtue of having learned to spell these names, might have some connection or serious beef with the Catholic Church.
While that’s not difficult to understand, that’s the moment when Dan Brown decided to put on his Miss Marple chapeau.
The spray-painted swastika made some sense (Hitler Youth Pope, Pius XII … WWII connection, etc.) but the minus-1 didn’t mean anything on any level. Minus one what?Â
Thirty minutes later, an RSS feed from PageOneQ linked to the local KGO-TV/ABC affiliate coverage in San Francisco, and behold, in the KGO photo, the minus-1 had been transformed into a second swastika. The KGO photo was posted online Sunday night at 7:45, but was obviously taken after the top photo.
Could it be that Francisco who provided the photo displayed at Joe.My.God. has some explaining to do? The upper photo seems to be of a work in progress.
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Ha ha.
What a nice-looking church. I wonder how much of that collection-basket money they actually give to the needy.
I’d just like to believe that we queers, of all people, can come up with something more imaginative than scribbling our dislikes on the sides of buildings.
It seems a little beneath us. See Christianist paranoia on parade for some better ideas.
The area where the swastika is/was in the top photo looks like it has been painted over – it’s possible the photo was taken while the wall was being re-painted (if a pot of paint was at the base of the wall where a right-handed painter would be likely to put it, it would be just out of shot) or that the church began to repaint then changed their minds and decided to keep the graffiti – it’s a pretty good advert for gay rights, after all.
The top photo could have been taken later – and it should be relatively easy to prove either way.
I corresponded with the reader who sent me the photo. According to him, the church was beginning to paint over the graffiti when he got there. He reports that it’s all painted over now.
Thanks for the update Joe.