Even with my track record for hating political correctness I have seldom been as irritated with a conversation as with the one I just had.

We're up in Madison for the first stop on our autumn tour, and I was relaxing in the green room after the rehearsal when the venue's PR lady came in. We got chatting and she explained that she liked our last album as it had some Hebrew psalms on it, and she's an orthodox Jew. Fair enough, I thought. But then I asked what was coming up in the theatre and she said that this was always a "difficult" time of year as they wanted to avoid "selling out" by putting on a Christmas show or concert. She was perfectly happy to put on something relating to other religions, but apparently the festival celebrating the birth of the Son of God simply didn't cut the mustard with her, and was rejected on the grounds of commercialism. This got me mad, but of course I couldn't say anything.

What made it worse was that then a friend of the group came in with her husband. She lives here, and she began to explain that the way out of worrying about offending different religions was to become a Unitarian Universalist. A What? Well, apparently, some chaps got together in the 18th century and founded Universalism. "What was the foundation of the group?" I asked, innocently enough. "Ah, well that's a large and interesting question" she replied, which was her way of getting out of saying that it had no basis whatsoever. It turned out that Unitarianism had been founded in a similarly uninspiring way, the two "churches" had dwindled in size and had to amalgamate (not much of an endorsement). On further questioning, I ascertained that this "religion" had absolutely no foundation in fact (or otherwise), had no belief structure whatsoever, and was in short a complete and utter waste of time. Her church here in Madison was run by a Buddhist, taught a hybrid Christian/Buddhist doctrine and, in her words, "basically believed that you should believe what you want as long as you're happy." Great - sounds like kindergarten to me.

You don't even want to know about the conversation we had on gay marriage....