Against Olive Garden

So A Couple Thousand Crazy People (AKA One Million Moms) is at it again. The group composed of totally-not-a-million not-necessarily-moms launched one of their first protests last summer against the upcoming television series Lucifer, which has recently begun airing on the Fox network. The group is serious about it, too. Now that the show is running, the group is organizing a campaign against one of the show's advertisers - Olive Garden restaurants.

On their website, the group asks viewers to "take action" against the series and Olive Garden, its corporate sponsor, with the following plea:

"Contact Olive Garden, who sponsored the spiritually dangerous program "Lucifer" and paid corporate dollars to promote their restaurants in association with the content of the program. Use the information we have provided on our website, and let Olive Garden know that its advertising dollars are supporting sympathy towards the devil and glorifying Satan and that financial support should be pulled immediately."

Of course, considering the religious nature of the series, "Lucifer" was bound to cause an uproar with some groups -- but does America's beloved Olive Garden deserve an attack?

Frankly, there are plenty of good reasons not to eat at Olive Garden that have nothing to do with the devil. The biggest one is that there are simply better Italian restaurants out there to choose from. I don't think the place is terrible, but generally speaking their food is somewhat bland and Americanized and I would much rather go for something more authentic.

Anyway, I highly doubt that this little circle of nutballs is going to have much effect on Olive Garden's profit margins. And it never ceases to amaze me the extent to which fundamentalists are down on fiction. It's like they think that this television series, based on a Neil Gaiman comic, somehow represents some sort of theological argument. But if there really even is a devil, I would say that it's extremely unlikely this fictional portrayal has anything to do with what he's actually like.

So seriously, what's the big deal?