After a morning of protesting at the local Planned Parenthood, several St. Louis Evangelical demonstrators took a break from screaming obscenities at young women getting medical checkups in order to go to the mall and scream obscenities at the apathetic employees of the West County Mall’s H&M clothing store for selling polyester clothing.
“A lot of other Evangelicals don’t realize this,” explained protest organizer Sally Shelderson, 43, a resident of St. Charles, “but the Bible specifically forbids mixing fibers in your clothes in Leviticus 19:19. So I got to thinking that we shouldn’t only be protesting abortion if our goal was to truly spread ALL the warnings of eternal damnation in the Lord’s holy book. In fact, many of our fellow Christian protesters who only seem to get involved when it calls for slut-shaming women are actually wearing polyester shirts and socks when they’re yelling out ‘whore’ insults! They’re protesting one sin while literally committing another! I even saw one protester this morning eating a cobb salad with shrimp on it. Shrimp! Can you believe it? Have these other Christian protesters ever even read Leviticus?”
Ms. Shelderson has built up an impressive Evangelical following in recent years thanks to her insistence that many more aspects of modern life deserve public shaming than just abortion.
“I loved her concept of diversity in criticism subjects,” explained Tenika Doyle, 26, of South City, an enthusiastic member of Shelderson’s protests. “If you only protest one variety of sinner, like Planned Parenthood patients, you find yourself committing sins of very dark judgement, and I don’t think Jesus would appreciate that much. So if you spread out the Biblical judgment a little, you can remind a greater diversity of people in public how gloriously inconvenient fundamentalist approaches to Christianity can be. And isn’t that the point of religion? To be so burdened with contemporarily arbitrary rules and regulations on daily life that you can’t help but be brutally reminded of God’s omnipresent judgement? I think so! And that’s why all these H&M shoppers need a good reminder that the mixing of fibers is a big Biblical faux pas, even though I don’t 100% understand why from a practical sense. Modern polyester clothes may have stronger fibers than cotton, and not wear down as quickly, wrinkle as much, or shrink so dramatically, but surely the ancient goat-herding epileptics who passed down the Bible’s rules orally for hundreds of pre-literate years had a perfectly legitimate reason to ban it. God works in mysterious ways, you know? As a young, socially woke person, however, I’d also like to protest H&M’s suspiciously cheap prices, which indicate a certain degree of unfairly valued Asian labor in their supply chain, but it’s frustrating that the Bible apparently finds no moral qualms with child slavery. I’ve looked! It actually has way more restrictions against bad-mouthing your parents than enslaving people for life. It’s puzzling. Sometimes it’s so hard to interpret what God wants. It would be nice if He maybe updated the Bible a bit some day, and cleared up some of the ambiguous passages and conflicting morals, you know?”
The H&M store employees, meanwhile, all agreed they were not paid enough to care about the protests going on in front of their store.
“This protest, or whatever it is, is pretty weird,” explained H&M’s Cheyenne Moore, 18, the afternoon shift’s designated clothes folder. “But I ate a pot brownie before coming in, so I’ve just been chilling listening to headphones while folding. It’s pretty easy to zone them out. They’re kind of blocking the entrance and obstructing customers from coming in, which I don’t really mind because I make the same amount of money per hour if we have one customer all day or ten thousand customers, so… If my boss or the H&M corporate higher-ups were willing to share some of the increased profits that an increase in my monotonous, soul-sucking work cultivates I might work a little harder, but they’re not, so… Adequate and fair compensation with legitimate trickle-down economic bonuses would inspire me to care, but the structural mobility of profits trickles only upward from my low wage drone work… Maybe I’m rambling because I’m really, really stoned.”
The Halfway Post also interviewed Peyton Haslon, 31, who was sitting on a bench outside the H&M store while his wife shopped.
“I’ve been writing down a lot of the things they’ve been yelling about in my phone,” Haslon said. “I had no idea about some of these Leviticus rules, but I checked them out and they’re really in there! Apparently we’re never supposed to ever eat the fat on meat because it all should be offered to God. And, after giving birth to boys, mothers are unclean for a week, like a typical Biblical menstruation, but then their blood has to be purified for another 33 days before they can touch anything holy. And after birthing girls, mothers are unclean for two weeks, and then have to wait a full 66 days. And the new moms have to bring a 1-year-old lamb to a priest for a burnt offering, and a young dove or pigeon for a sin offering. I guess I’ll have to start raising lambs and doves because my wife is pregnant with our first child, and we want a bunch of kids. I’ve spent my whole life making fun of gay people and voting against gay marriage according to the Bible, so I’d hate to be a hypocrite and not also orient my life according to all the other rules in Leviticus!”
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