They Don't Really Mean It

Simcha Fisher smacks down that COEXIST bumper sticker that irritates the stuffing out of me every time I see one. It's not the smug moralizing, it's the fact that it is itself an act of disrespect of precisely the kind it's supposedly decrying.

this is worse than using a picture of child’s face as a mouse pad, which is unseemly. This is worse than using the American flag as boxer shorts or dish towels, which is disrespectful. By using meaningful symbols as mere letters in a word, this bumper sticker subsumes the significant and specific into a suffocating mass of indiscriminate acceptance.
Don’t use the cross as a T, okay? And don’t use the star of David as an X. They’re not, like, logos for “Jesus Brand” and “Judaism, Inc.” Don’t tell me “it’s just a design” or “we were going for the visual impact — don’t read too much into it.” You should be glad someone’s paying attention to your message.

What that sticker says to me when I see it is "Religious people, shut up." Which is why it's the perfect accompaniment to the old "Bush scares me" sticker, which was also false --because anyone scared would not be driving around with that bumper sticker.

Update: GDE notes in my combox an excellent comment from the original post:

Also the blithe unwillingness to accept that the biggest tolerance problem in our world, by far, is that the capital “C” is trying to kill all the other letters. If they fully accepted this fact and wanted to spread their message as effectively as possible, they’d take their next holiday in Pakistan, and be sure to slap this bumper sticker on their rental car. But it’s ever so much safer to harangue the “x” and “t” from the comfort of a free and peaceful society, isn’t it?
Also the realization that if the “e” were replaced by a Republican elephant (ignore the difference in shapes…just roll with me on this), the sales of this bumper sticker would decline by 97% in university towns, whether or not the “s” were at the same time replaced by a Democrat donkey. Even though that’s one variety of tolerance these people actually do need to be reminded of each and every day.
(And can you even imagine if there were universally-recognized symbols for “pro-life” and “pro-Proposition-8″ and “I support Arizona on immigration”?)

Update: More on what the sticker really means.