"Witchcraft!!"
Originally published 1 May 2001

This strip is part of a storyline in which Llewellyn decides to homeschool Ozy. Unfortunately, the one bookstore that caters to homeschoolers caters mostly to people whose reasons for taking their kids out of the public school system are somewhat...different.

I did get a few letters accusing me of negatively stereotyping Christians, when this first ran. Let me make one thing clear: I am not anti-Christian. I think the particular sorts of Christians depicted in this sequence are a bit loopy. But I don't think I at any point indicated in any way that I thought they were represenative of Christians as a whole.

It's an interesting phenomenon--any time you depict any member of a group negatively, invariably other members of that group, however little they may resemble the people being depicted, will accuse you of unfairly stereotyping their group. (I remember a flap over the movie "Aladdin"--at least one Arab-American anti-defamation group felt the film was demeaning because it did not depict every single Arab character, in a movie entirely populated by Arabs, positively. It seems like if you're required to do that, it makes for a pretty dull story.)

All I can say is, unless you're actually in the habit of tarring and feathering people for witchcraft, this strip is not about you.

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