I swear, I am not making this up.
It sounds like one of my stranger dreams. “I dreamed that a right-wing Christian organization was trying to stop pornography by carrying a giant inflatable blue elephant from town to town.” I was almost tempted to file it in my dream diary.
But this is a real thing. There’s an anti-porn Christian-Right campaign that has selected October 7th as National Porn Sunday, a day to draw attention to what they see as the national problem of pornography. Because they see porn as the “elephant in the room” (or the “elephant in the pew”) that nobody talks about, they are publicizing National Porn Sunday by taking a 25-foot inflatable blue elephant on a 20-city tour.
The National Porn Sunday Elephant.
I have been having giggle-fits about it all day.
The thing that keeps striking me about the National Porn Sunday Elephant is how much the phrase sounds like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” A collection of adjectives and nouns that are grammatically correct, and yet apparently selected almost entirely at random. Like a phrase someone would say if they had brain damage in Wernicke’s area. Noam Chomsky composed a famous sentence (I believe it’s in Bartlett’s Quotations) to demonstrate that a sentence can make perfect syntactical sense without making any semantic sense: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That’s what the National Porn Sunday Elephant sounds like.
I’m not going to get into the actual hysterical absurdity of trying to stop pornography by carrying a giant inflatable blue elephant from town to town. I’m certainly not going to get into the assumption that the existence and use of porn is a problem. I’m not even going to ask why the National Porn Sunday Elephant is blue.
I’m just going to say over and over again:
(Via Feministing. The finest source for all your porn Sunday elephant news.)