Update: The ornaments are available again, contact JesusInLove
(RNS) Jesus has two mommies. Or two daddies. Take your pick.
Actually, Jesus had two mommies and daddies in a pair of same-sex-themed Christmas ornaments for sale online until the designer withdrew them after a protest by a British Christian interest group.
Mark Thaler, a San Francisco-based artist and designer, was offering the ornaments via Zazzle.com, the online retailer of all things odd. They were round discs featuring figurines of either two Josephs or two Marys gazing at a baby Jesus in the manger.
The ornaments were based on art by Kittredge Cherry, an ordained pastor who is also a lesbian and an author. They sold for 13 British pounds — or about $16.
That is, until the a British group called Christian Concern objected.
“These decorations are a desperate and ridiculous attempt to pretend that homosexual relationships are pure and holy,” Andrea Williams, Christian Concern’s chief executive, told the British newspaper The Daily Mail. “They blasphemously portray the Lord Jesus being parented by a homosexual couple. What depths will the LGBT lobby stoop to in order to try and normalise their behaviour?”
Thaler, who sells various other things via Zazzle, including a baby onesie proclaiming the tiny wearer a member of the “Jewish American Princess Patrol,” or “JAPP,” removed the offending ornaments earlier this week.
“Not everyone’s viewpoints are the same,” he told The Daily Mail. “People need to coexist and not judge one another.”
Still for sale in Thaler’s Zazzle shop — a Christmas card featuring two men wearing little more than Santa hats kissing by a Christmas tree.
