Idiocy rules in argument over race of Santa Claus, Jesus Christ

What's the dumbest possible thing we could possibly be arguing about at this time in our history?

How about the race of a fictional character?

When Megyn Kelly brought up the "controversy" the other day, telling the children of America not to worry, that Santa Claus was of course a white man, I wasn't aware there had been a huge debate about it.

The real question is which "kids" she was addressing. Since her broadcast started at 10 p.m., the "kids" would have to be old enough to stay up that late, interested enough to watch what passes for news on Fox yet still young enough and uninformed enough to believe in Santa Claus.

It's a silly point to argue, but at least Santa comes from northern European legends and was "created" by white people.

Where Kelly stepped off the cliff into the abyss was when she reassured those same "children" by telling them Jesus of Nazareth was also a white man.

Now that is about as likely as learning that Jackie Robinson was white. The problem is that at the time Jesus lived and in the part of the world where he preached, there weren't really any white men. The closest was probably the Roman troops who were occupying that part of the Roman Empire, but very few of them were the blonde-haired, blue-eyed ideal that seems to show up in recent depictions of Christ.

Jesus? Maybe.

Of course Jesus was Jewish, and being from the Middle East, he was far more likely to be dark and swarthy than he is now depicted.

Still, Kelly doesn't seem to want to admit that, and things got even stupider when a libertarian talk-radio host got into the act.

Neal Boortz was filling in on the Herman Cain Show, and he defended the portrayals of both Santa and Jesus as white men with a very strange analogy.

“You know, I’m going to scream and complain because Martin Luther King is always portrayed as black. It just ain’t right.”

I don't know whether Boortz was joking or serious. With libertarians, you can never be sure, but the problem is that even if he was joking, a lot of people in the audience wouldn't get the joke. We have gone way too far into satire and irony, and a week doesn't go by that someone ostensibly doing the news is fooled by someone else's intricate joke.

It's tough being white these days, at least for those who care about it. White people ruled the world for hundreds of years, and as recently as the middle of the 20th century, people were still openly discussing the geopolitical situation in racial terms.

Those days are passing, though.

Jesus isn't white anymore.

And neither was Martin Luther King.