The monstrosity of SUVs

Arianna Huffington has recently launched a new anti-SUV project (this link via Where’s the soap). It aims to persuade Merkins that buying SUVs funds terrorism, which is a fun way to make their brains hurt. The fourth question of the FAQ (they’re all basically along the lines of “Why are you against SUVs?”) is gobsmacking:

There’s another anti-SUV group asking “What Would Jesus Drive?” Well, Jesus was a carpenter. Wouldn’t he be driving a full-sized pick-up truck that’s every bit as inefficient as a large SUV?

The answer, predictably, is, more or less, “Everyone isn’t a carpenter”. And the rest of the page is reasonable enough. It’s the question that boggles me. Apparently, a large enough number of people in the US believe that “What would Jesus drive?” is a reasonable question. Eh? Are these people fellow members of the Western world?

Forget, for a moment, the preposterous notion of separation of chuch and state, that we shouldn’t have our everyday choices dictated to us by the printed legacy of what Charlie calls a middle-Eastern death cult. Assume for a moment that whatever was valid two thousand years ago still applies to us, even when adapted to fit modern concepts like SUVs.

But it’s the fact that people are using as a major argument, apparently - major enough to have to be answered early in a FAQ - the fact that Jesus was a carpenter.

Yes, so? Harrison Ford was a carpenter. If you’re going to go on about how Jesus was a carpenter, so therefore he’d drive a SUV in these days, so it should be fine for anyone to also drive a SUV, well, it’s a short step before you start mentioning that Jesus was right-handed, so there’s no reason to design anything for left-handed people, because they’re not as holy. (Of course, if it turns out that Jesus was left-handed, well, sorry guys.)

Feh.