Söder’s Rainbow

Bavaria’s premier Markus Söder pushed through a law requiring every state building to hang a cross starting June 1st. His argument is that the cross represents Christian Western cultural identity, not religion specifically. It’s the kind of line you deliver when you’re not thinking very hard about what you’re saying.

The constitutional problem is straightforward. The state and church are supposed to stay separate—that’s actually in the law—but Söder’s doing this anyway. Someone named René pointed out the obvious issue online: you can’t strip the religious meaning from a religious symbol just because you’ve decided its cultural cache matters more. The whole mandate probably violates the very document it claims to respect. But that’s not the point. The point is the move—it’s pure politics, pure performance.

Then the photograph happened. Söder at a press event holding the cross, and at that particular angle, in that particular light, it looks like something else entirely. Something rainbow-colored. Something cylindrical. Something you’d expect to find in a nightstand drawer, not hanging in a school. The internet saw it immediately and the image went everywhere. It’s genuinely the best argument against his entire mandate. Not the law itself, not constitutional violation, just a photograph of a man holding what clearly looks like a dildo.

That’s what’s actually going up in every Bavarian government office, every school, every state building starting next month. Not a cross. This.