Ah, Portlandia.

On Saturday, at a Pride Festival in Portland, two local artists decided it would be brilliantly original and edgy to poke a stick at traditional Christians. (Ho hum, so original). So they rolled marijuana joints in selected pages of the Bible and offered them to Festival attendees.

A “menu” was offered of seven joints, six using pages from the Bible that contained verses prohibiting homosexuality, while the seventh included verses about love.

The crowd, of course, thought it was genius.

Desecrating a religion’s holy book — hmm, something sounds familiar about that, doesn’t it?

Oh, yes. Remember back in 2005 when Muslim inmates at Guantanamo Bay accused military guards and interrogators of flushing pages of the Koran down the toilet? Newsweek magazine was all over that story, and furor across the Muslim world erupted, as in Afghanistan, where people were killed. Protests were held in London, as seen in the video below, where crosses and American flags were burned.

The Pentagon investigated and found no evidence that American personnel had committed such an act.

In 2008, a Jewish student at Pace University threw pages of a Koran into the toilet after disputes with Muslims, and for his part received 300 hours of community service after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct.

I’m just sitting at my laptop, waiting for Christians throughout the world to riot. I’m waiting for the artists in Portland to be sentenced to community service in a Christian charity — maybe the Salvation Army or Catholic Charities — for desecrating the holy book of my faith. It won’t happen, though, because while Christians may be offended at such antics, we also believe in the freedom of expression that is guaranteed to all Americans, even those who engage in such sophomoric antics as smoking joints rolled in the pages of the Bible.