I got a chuckle when this particular meme hit my Twitter feed this week. Just so the web-crawlers get the full text:

You’re allowed to believe in a god.

You’re allowed to believe unicorns live in your shoes, for all I care. But the day you start telling me how to wear my shoes so I don’t upset the unicorns, I have a problem with you. The day you start involving the unicorns in making decisions for this country, I have a big problem with you.

Matthew Shultz

This meme employs a literary device that I have always liked, but for which I do not have a proper term to describe. I think of it as the noun-swap: exchanging ‘god’ for ‘unicorns’. People have poor logic circuits, and they are often overwhelmed by associations. They cannot follow lines of reasoning if the subject is embedded with sacred dimensionality. But if you swap the nouns to something else, you dislocate the argument from the exception clauses many people might otherwise grant. It can help jail-break the logic from someone’s sacred fog.

My favorite line in this meme was:

…the day you start telling me how to wear my shoes so I don’t upset the unicorns, I have a problem with you.